One of the emblematic moments in recent American political history was Ronald Reagan's declaration in his 1981 Inaugural Address that "government is not the solution; government is the problem." What was notable was not the sentiment; Reagan had been delivering resonant but empty anti-government boilerplate for thirty years as a talking head for General Electric and other corporate sponsors. What was ominous was the roar of approval that greeted his pronouncement, in the moment and afterward. The decades-long campaign by American business to cultivate popular mistrust of government and blind trust in the "free market" had borne poisoned fruit. That campaign is the subject of Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway's pathbreaking study, The Big Myth.

The beginnings of American capitalism in the late 19^th century were "a deadly affair," they point out. Mines, factories, and railways were death traps: "according to one estimate, in 1900 one in every thousand American workers was killed on the job, the equivalent now of 1.5 million people every year." The greed and callousness of early American capitalists produced widespread worker opposition, which was savagely put down by a combination of conservative judges, private armies, municipal police, and federal troops.

The scandal of early American labor relations brought on a reaction: a round of legislation during the Progressive Era, including workmen's compensation, workplace safety, anti-child labor laws, anti-monopoly laws, laws against the (then widespread) adulteration of food and drink, and more. Businessmen were outraged. Unable to sic their Pinkertons on state and federal legislators, they resorted instead to propagandizing the public. They have never ceased.

Efforts to regulate child labor aroused particularly fierce opposition. With the candor and transparency that would characterize all their subsequent efforts, leading businessmen formed a group named the Committee for the Protection of Child, Family, School, and Church to oppose the Child Labor Amendment, which had passed Congress in 1924. The Committee took out newspaper advertisements claiming, absurdly, that "the amendment would prevent boys from doing chores around the farm and girls from doing the dishes." The Committee induced the president of Columbia, Nicholas Butler, to oppose the amendment because "liberty is more precious than equality," and a Methodist bishop to warn that the amendment would fatally undermine parental authority. The amendment was defeated.

Even before this struggle, the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM) had a history of illegal lobbying activities on behalf of pro-business, anti-union candidates. Their opposition to labor reform employed a panoply of tactics: "slippery-slope arguments, ad hominem and straw man attacks, misrepresentations, denial of documented evidence," dubious expert testimony, and, unfailingly, accusations that what reformers were really aiming at was "socialism." The NAM would deploy this playbook in one political battle after another throughout the twentieth century.

The next great conflict recounted in The Big Myth was over electric power. The 1920s were the dawn of the electric age in the US and Europe. Though access to power was life-changing for those who had it, rural Americans didn't. It simply was not profitable to generate electricity in agricultural areas. Some Progressives, including Gifford Pinchot, then governor of Pennsylvania, proposed a public-private partnership to bring capacity to unserved areas (and incidentally to spare new customers the electrical industry's notoriously corrupt pricing).

The industry went ballistic. Five hundred of the largest privately owned electric utilities, controlling 90 percent of US output, formed the National Electric Light Association (NELA), which mounted what the Federal Trade Commission called "the largest peacetime propaganda campaign ever conducted by private interests in this country." They targeted the entire US educational system, from grade school to university, in an effort "to mold the minds of the current generation and those to come." The director of the National Popular Government League saw the scope of NELA's campaign as "breathtaking" in scope, aiming to insure that all "judges, lawmakers, members of public utility commissions, prosecuting attorneys, and engineers, in short all public officials, will be so trained as automatically to oppose genuine regulation, public ownership, honest valuations, equitable rates, etc."

Between 1921 and 1927, nearly 13,000 industry-sponsored (often industry-written) editorials appeared in newspapers opposing public ownership. The industry also sponsored thousands of textbooks and distributed hundreds of thousands of pamphlets denying or minimizing industry abuses and portraying public utilities as inferior to private ones. Harvard Business School was a particular target, with two prominent professors working hand-in-glove with NELA to spread the utilities' point of view in textbooks and teaching.

Scrupulous accuracy and even-handedness were not characteristic of these efforts. Later academic historians have branded NELA's campaign "underhanded" and "unethical," rife with "half-truths and at times outright lies." At the time, the FTC noted "false and misleading statements of fact, as well as opinions about public policy found in reports and expert testimony of prominent university professors who are now discovered to have been in the pay of the private utilities." Industry-sponsored academic studies were subtly or blatantly falsified to show that privately-owned electricity was cheaper and more efficient than municipally-owned.

NELA's massive disinformation campaign had a mixed success. The first round of public-power proposals went down to defeat, but the subsequent FTC investigation discredited the organization so thoroughly that it dissolved - only to reconstitute itself as the Edison Electric Institute, another powerful anti-regulation group, with climate-change denialism added to its portfolio. Eventually rural America got electricity, thanks to the New Deal. Still, as Oreskes and Conway observe, "NELA may have lost the battle over rural electrification, but it won the war over what would be taught in American business schools."

Soon the dogma that the government must never intervene in the economy was to be entirely discredited. When the economy crashed in 1929, an orthodox champion of unregulated markets, Herbert Hoover, had just become president. Hoover did virtually nothing, waiting for the economy to self-correct. It did not. After immense suffering, the subsequent administration of Franklin Delano Roosevelt launched a wave of loan programs, subsidies, public works, financial and utilities reforms, and antitrust laws that restarted the economy.

Industry was appalled. NELA and the utility companies opposed the TVA with the same arguments (and sometimes the same falsified statistics) they'd used in opposing earlier rural electrification efforts, but the battle over electrification was lost. A new organization of conservative businessmen, the American Liberty League, spearheaded and financed by the du Ponts of Delaware, was formed in 1934 to protect (rich) Americans' constitutional freedoms from the New Deal. Any compromise of economic freedom, they insisted, would inevitably lead to despotism. Labor unions especially alarmed and infuriated them, and the National Labor Relations Board, which protected workers' right to organize in the face of nearly invariable employer harassment, was perhaps the most bitterly resented provision of the New Deal.

The Liberty League outdid even is predecessors in propagandistic zeal. They printed more than a hundred pamphlets in their first two years, which were distributed to hundreds of newspapers, thousands of libraries, and every member of Congress and generated, by their estimate, two hundred thousand news stories. And they attained a uniquely high pitch of hysteria: in 1935 one of their members warned of Roosevelt's desire to "utterly destroy" liberty: "Neither Mussolini nor Hitler nor Stalin of Russia have gone so far."

The New Deal's and FDR's popularity held throughout the 30s. The business candidates, Alf Landon and Wendell Wilkie, went down to crushing defeats in 1936 and 1940. The Liberty League folded in 1940 and passed the baton back to the National Association of Manufacturers. But they had accomplished one thing, at least: they had repeated countless times their false equivalence between political freedom and the absence of business regulation, so often that every American heard it countless times. It was an important contribution to the fundamental long-term goal: rendering distrust of government nearly instinctive among a large fraction of Americans.

The NAM kept up the pace: films and slide shows, newspaper advertisements, direct mail, billboards, posters, pamphlets, window displays, advertising boycotts. In 1933, according to the NAM's archives, "2 million copies of cartoons, 4.5 million copies of newspaper columns written by pro-business economists, 2.4 million foreign language news pieces and 11 million employee leaflets. [We] also displayed 45,000 billboards, which were seen by an estimated 65 million Americans daily, while its film series was viewed by approximately 18 million." (By the authors' calculations, this means at half the US population were exposed to NAM's propaganda. Other documents mention the association's contact with 330 industrial associations, 521 daily and 1,980 weekly newspapers, reaching nearly 44 million readers, "a flood of press releases, 250,000 pieces of supplemental literature, 115,262 reprint posters, and 275 individually sponsored advertisements." A fifteen-minute NAM-sponsored radio program ran on 196 stations and reached nearly 12 million listeners. There were also weekly clippings sent to 4,600 weekly and 500 daily papers, as well as 2,700 "house organs." Materials went to 1,750 editorial writers, business columnists, and radio commentators.

It was a staggering outreach effort, like nothing else then or (except for contemporary right-wing propaganda) now. And what was the message? One historian analyzed a sample and found "three recurring themes consistent with NAM messaging: (1) an activist government is dangerous; (2) industry is best suited to lead the country; and (3) free enterprise is essential to democracy." Simplistic to the point of simple-mindedness but tarted up with state-of-the-art advertising jargon and jingles and delivered with numbing frequency and ubiquity, it became by sheer irresistible force of repetition a part of America's climate of opinion.

Mass culture was not safe from market fundamentalism. The NAM produced a weekly soap, a radio show called The American Family Robinson, about a very middling Middle American family (from the town of Centerville), learning a new lesson every week about the virtues of free enterprise and the dangers of collectivism and the New Deal. It was broadcast on 300 stations and ran from 1935 to 1940. Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House books, which sold sixty million copies, were actually collaborations with her daughter, Rose Wilder Lane, a fanatical libertarian whose contempt for democracy alarmed even her mentor, Mises. In the 1970s the novels became the basis of a wildly successful television series - 200 episodes with an average of 17 million viewers - with the same cramped historical and political vision as the books. In 1946 the president of the US Chamber of Commerce became president of the Motion Picture Association of America and decreed: "We'll have no more Grapes of Wrath ... no more films that deal with the seamy side of American life ... no more films that treat the banker as villain." With the additional encouragement of the House Un-American Activities Committee, Hollywood sank into a decade of political blandness. And in 1953 the General Electric Corporation poached the president of the Screen Actors Guild, Ronald Reagan, making him the host of the heavily pro-business, anti-union General Electric Theater and a nationwide speaker, a platform that probably rescued him from permanent obscurity.

When opportunities arose after World War II to sponsor a better class of free-market apologetics, NAM and its allies were not behindhand. The Austrian economic theorists Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek needed assistance leaving Europe and resettling in the United States, so wealthy businessmen helped Mises find an academic position and arranged for Hayek's The Road to Serfdom - the "road" was allegedly the New Deal in America and the welfare state in England - to be published in condensed form in Reader's Digest. When Hayek and others formed the Mont Pelerin Society to refine and propagate free-market ideas, businessmen and right-wing operatives took their formulations in a more doctrinaire and anti-government direction than at least some of the original theorists intended. According to a historian of the movement, those theorists later "looked with admiration and disapprobation at the world Milton Friedman had wrought." But Friedman, though a more strident and less nuanced thinker, for that reason suited businessmen better than Hayek and Mises, so his influence prevailed.

Conservative donors were more than instrumental in institutionalizing free-market ideology at the University of Chicago and elsewhere. As Oreskes and Conway point out: "Before World War II most external funding for basic academic research came from private patrons. Still, it was highly irregular for a private individual [ie, Harold Luhnow] to pay a particular professor's [ie, Hayek's] salary. Moreover, Luhnow did not simply provide the money: he had structured and shaped the project [Luhnow's and Hayek's Free Market Project, a libertarian think tank]. He and Crane picked the people and the place. Open competition had not brought Ludwig von Mises to NYU, and open academic competition did not bring Friedrich von Hayek to Chicago or create the Free Market Project. Jasper Crane and Harold Luhnow did. And while NAM and other conservative groups and individuals had long attacked socialism and communism as 'foreign theories' and trade unionism as the product of 'foreign influence' ... Luhnow and Crane now literally financed foreigners to import foreign ideas and dress them up in American clothes."

The election of Ronald Reagan brought the free-market wrecking crew to power, and they have been diligently dismantling the New Deal ever since, to America's incalculable cost: burgeoning economic inequality, the destruction of labor unions, lack of health insurance for millions, environmental degradation, diminished transparency and democratic accountability. With the acquiescence and at times the active cooperation of a Democratic Party apparently disillusioned with its own New Deal and Great Society heritage, the Republicans rolled back huge swaths of regulation: antitrust, labor, voting rights, environmental, pharmaceutical, chemical, food safety, workplace safety, and of course, progressive taxation. It was payback time.

Their victory has not caused business to slacken in its support for the big myth, even if the forms have changed somewhat since the days of the NELA and the Liberty League. The baneful Citizens United decision has enabled corporations and wealthy individuals to spend without limit on political candidates, and they do. Previous limits to concentrated ownership in broadcasting have been removed, resulting in vast networks like the right-wing Clear Channel. Congress and the Supreme Court have increasingly declined to enforce the separation of church and state, giving rise to a grassroots army at the service of the Republican Party. And a new round of think tanks and foundations have arisen - American Enterprise Institute, Heritage, Cato, Koch, Mercer, Scaife, the Federalist Society - to turn money into right-wing opinion.

The Big Myth should be a landmark. It sets itself one of the biggest of historical problems: how did a foundational American belief - the conviction that social problems are better left to the unregulated ("free") market than to a democratically accountable government - acquire its dominance? With admirable rigor and thoroughness, it produces a convincing answer. It is hard to imagine a more valuable contribution to the preservation of America's endangered democracy.

                  MIDDLEMARCH AND MORAL BEAUTY

"Worship the Lord in the beauty of holiness," says the Psalmist (29.2). Many spiritual writers have discoursed on this theme, including, curiously, Jonathan Edwards, better known for terrifying congregations with his famous sermon on "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God." "The moral beauty of God ... nothing can withstand," he writes in his Religious Affections (1746). "All the spiritual beauty of Christ's human nature, consisting in his meekness, lowliness, patience, heavenliness, love to God, love to men, condescension to the mean and vile, and compassion to the miserable, etc. all is summed up in his holiness."

[To read the whole thing, go here: https://www.plough.com/en/topics/life/beauty/the-moral-beauty-of-middlemarch]

                           Spellbound

By now, there is not much left to say about Donald Trump. Anyone who denies that he's ignorant, dishonest, vain, callous, greedy, and contemptuous of law and constitutional principle is either pretending or deluded. The former, mostly political columnists looking to tart up the plain truth in ceaseless pursuit of clicks, may be safely ignored. The latter make up approximately 40 percent of the electorate. They are a problem.

Through every absurdity, every outrage, every scandal, they have never wavered. Through two tax cuts that have transferred trillions of dollars from them to the top tax brackets, they have remained faithful. Through savage increases in health insurance costs to themselves and their neighbors, they have not doubted. Despite his vile boasts about grabbing women's genitals and his conviction for sexual assault (the judge called it "rape"), they love him still. They are spellbound.

This steadfast plurality did not come from nowhere. For more than a hundred years, in every corner of the country, in every medium, pro-business messaging, in almost inconceivable quantities, has flooded the consciousness of Americans, in the form of pamphlets, textbooks, planted news stories, subsidized scientific research, bespoke Congressional testimony, radio and TV programs, and more.

Such highly partisan ideological saturation bombing was bound to have some effect. Still, there were limits to the persuasiveness of pro-business messaging. It was, after all, plainly false that business could be trusted to look after the interests of non-rich Americans, and many non-rich Americans figured that out. But then, in the Sixties, the Republican Party received two enormous gifts: the Civil Rights Act and the counterculture of the young. Eagerly, Republicans responded with their "Southern strategy" and a "culture war." Civil rights enforcement became "big government" and resistance to it became support for "states' rights." Feminism, sex education, and homosexual rights became "attacks on the family." Democrats responded to these cynical strategies in their usual clueless fashion, doubling down on court rulings rather than compromising and creating democratic forums in which to argue with their opponents and the public. The Republicans, meanwhile, were virtuosi of resentment, convincing the 40 percent that they were victims of "the elites" - as though they were not far more fundamentally a victim [VICTIMS] of the economic elites the Republican Party exists above all to further enrich. From Chuck Colson to Roger Ailes to Steve Bannon, Republican political consultants have combined genius with mean-spiritedness in roughly equal proportions. And Democrats, despite such brilliant warnings as Thomas Frank's What's the Matter with Kansas?, have continued helpless victims.

It was, perhaps, difficult to know what to make of Trump at first. But in retrospect it's clear that the Democrats' response to Trump in his first term was disastrous. His supporters simply could not see the Mueller investigation or the first impeachment as adequate grounds for removal from office. The Democrats ignored that very widespread feeling rather than trying to understand it. Of course both the Trump campaign's dalliance with Russian intelligence and Trump's attempt to extort from Vladimir Zelensky an investigation of Hunter Biden were disgraceful, but they were arguably venial rather than mortal sins. Trump's base was convinced that, as so often, Democrats were looking for substantive victories through legal maneuvering. They doubled down in support of Trump, which probably primed them to believe the "Stop the Steal" canard and stiffened the resistance of Congressional Republicans to the more serious second impeachment after January 6. So now we're stuck with him.

Is he a fascist? If fascism is an ideology of racial or national supremacy, then Trump, however thuggish, is not a fascist. An ideology may be very primitive or confused, but there must be an idea in it somewhere. Trump appears not to have an idea in his head - he has rarely, if ever, put two coherent sentences together on any subject. "America First" is, like "Make America Great Again," simply and solely a campaign slogan. He has never even begun to say what America means to him or why (or when) it was great. What could he know about America, anyway? He had only the narrowest experience of the country before campaigning for president: a corrupt New York City real estate developer, a close associate of Roy Cohn (a figure at least as evil as Trump's other close friend Jeffrey Epstein), a high-living New York City and Palm Beach celebrity, and the host of a trashy popular TV show. He has no education and never reads, spending all his spare time watching Fox TV and babbling on Truth Social.

If not fascism, what? I don't think a single -ism defines the whole toxic stew, though several are mixed in. Project 2025 was a particularly raw version of market fundamentalism, certainly more radical than Hayek or even Friedman would countenance - they at least saw the point of government. Christian nationalism and Catholic integralism are well represented among his supporters and have figured heavily in his judicial selections, where they assort oddly with Federalist Society legal minimalism and originalism. His climate policy does not issue from skepticism about the science - he simply, corruptly sold his energy policy to the oil companies for a huge campaign contribution. And while his immigration policy is animated by nativism (along with a great deal of theatrical sadism), Trump's motives, in this and all other respects, appear more mercenary than ideological. For example, sending untrained, inexperienced, fully armed ICE operatives into blue cities and assuring them that they have "absolute immunity" is probably intended, at least in part, to provoke protests that may provide an excuse for declaring a state of emergency, which he hopes will allow the executive branch to take control of the midterm elections. For none of these -isms has Trump articulated any rationale, and it's very doubtful he could. Rather than a Maximum Leader, he is probably best thought of as a gangster with a very formidable organization - the US government - behind him and a sure sense of what will appeal to that mesmerized 40 percent.

Will they like a bare-knuckled foreign policy? Let us hope they are more principled than the liberal intelligentsia: the Atlantic, for example, which assured us at great length that the indictment against Maduro was "legally sound," or Foreign Affairs, who quickly assembled experts to speculate about "the difficult and dangerous path now facing the United States (sic) and Venezuela." When Marjorie Taylor Greene says "This is wrong" and the usual liberal interventionist suspects say "Well ... we're afraid this may not succeed," one understands yet again how little moral capital Democrats will bring to their fight - if they should ever begin to fight - for the soul of the 40 percent.

 Trump's "National Security Strategy 2025" is a mixture of glaring hypocrisy, selective history, and sheer truculence, along with generous helpings of hyperbolic praise for the wisdom and fortitude of "The President of Peace." "We must rebuild an economy in which prosperity is broadly based and widely shared, not concentrated at the top." Trump's $4 trillion tax cuts, heavily weighted toward corporations and the ultra-rich, should help with that. The document rejects "global domination" and promises to "set a high bar for what constitutes a justified intervention" - this a few months after illegally bombing Iran and a few weeks before illegally invading Venezuela. "The United States will insist on being treated fairly by other countries. We will no longer tolerate, and can no longer afford, free-riding, trade imbalances, predatory economic practices, and other impositions on our nation's historic goodwill that disadvantage our interests." We will, however, happily tolerate the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank continuing to wreck the economies of developing countries with "structural adjustment programs" imposed at the behest of Wall Street banks. "We want to ensure that the Western Hemisphere remains reasonably stable and well-governed enough to prevent and discourage mass migration to the United States." No acknowledgment, unsurprisingly, that US support for brutally repressive regimes in Central America over several decades probably helped bring about the immigration crisis the Trump administration cynically exploits.  About the single largest problem facing humanity, there is one sentence: "We reject the disastrous 'climate change' and 'Net Zero' ideologies that have so greatly harmed Europe, threaten the United States, and subsidize our adversaries." Not "we reject because" - they have no reasons. With a proudly anti-intellectual flourish, Trump gives away global economic supremacy to China and condemns many millions of late twenty-first century citizens to hunger, disease, and extreme weather.

What is original in the document is what may be worst in it. Adherence to international law has never been a strong suit of American foreign policy - on the contrary. But every preceding administration has at least expressed fealty to the ideal. Trump wants to kill it.

We stand for the sovereign rights of nations, against the sovereignty-sapping incursions of the most intrusive transnational organizations ... The United States will unapologetically protect our own sovereignty. This includes preventing its erosion by transnational and international organizations ... The United States will chart our own course in the world and determine our own destiny, free of outside interference.

Given Trump's recent lawlessness, these passages amount to a declaration of criminal intent, an avowal that he has no more intention of obeying international law than domestic law. Is this brazenness preferable to decades of liberal (and conservative) hypocrisy about America's devotion to the rule of law? I leave that as an exercise for the reader.

After the National Security Document appeared, the editors of the New York Times interviewed Trump. The interview included this faintly ludicrous exchange:

 Do you see any checks on your power on the world stage? Is there anything that could stop you if you wanted to?

Yeah, there is one thing. My own morality. My own mind. It's the only thing that can stop me, and that's very good.

Not international law?

I don't need international law.

"My morality"? This is someone who, as a number of psychologists and other social scientists told Thomas Edsall in the New York Times early this year, with alarming plausibility, cannot tell right from wrong and is helpless before his impulses. He is someone who shut out black tenants from his buildings, bribed politicians, stiffed contractors, cheated on several wives, regularly slanders opponents, and broke all records for presidential grift with his $400 million personal plane from a foreign tyranny, a stablecoin bought by those seeking his favor that enriched him by hundreds of millions of dollars, and a $7 billion luxury resort in Saudi Arabia. Who abruptly, without explanation, terminated aid programs that had saved millions of lives in poor countries. And who, perhaps worst of all, lied unstintingly and inflamed millions of followers in order to steal a presidential election from the legitimate winner. He is, by many orders of magnitude, the most immoral, even psychopathic human being ever to occupy the presidency. If his morality is all that stands between us and the use of nuclear weapons, perhaps we should begin to wind up the earth's affairs. Fortunately, his vanity also stands between us and extinction, which he may feel would be bad for his reputation.

                            ******************

"We are not permitted to despair of the commonwealth," said Thomas Jefferson; and we may be sure Abraham Lincoln would have nodded his great head in somber assent. But we are not permitted to underestimate the difficulties, either. Democracy can survive an ignorant and inflamed electorate, but it cannot survive a permanently, systematically deluded one. When 51 percent of Republicans still believe that the 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump, solely because he has said so thousands of times, the Republic is in peril. Fifty-one percent of Republicans - tens of millions of people - have been misled on a colossal scale, not merely with respect to this one claim but, more fundamentally, with respect to the credibility of those making and transmitting this and other obviously false claims: about taxes, regulation, health insurance, climate change, immigration, vote suppression, and virtually every other policy question.

Those making the false claims - Trump and other Republican politicians - are a problem. But a more important problem is the media that transmit those claims uncritically, knowing - and they must know - that they are false, while at the same time continually, mendaciously depicting the Republicans' political opponents as not merely mistaken but irresponsible and disloyal. "If only the 40 percent would read the New York Times," we may think to ourselves, "they would wake up!" But alas, Fox, Sinclair, Clear Channel, One America, Christian News Network, and a slew of right-wing podcasts have thrown a mental cordon around the 40 percent. Our democratic impulse is to reach out to them - they are our fellow citizens, after all. But they seem lost to us, sleeping while their freedoms and ours are daily whittled away.

Breaking down the right-wing media's Iron Curtain will be a very long-term project. The 40 percent will probably continue spellbound for quite a while. The immediate task is simply to defeat them electorally, to reverse the civic cataclysm they have unwittingly unleashed. The 60 percent - lazy, apathetic, complacent, fractious, disorganized, underfunded, gerrymandered - had better get our act together.

                                             [END]

George Scialabba is the author, most recently, of The Sealed Envelope.

What is a public intellectual? Saint Augustine wrote: "What is time? As long as no one asks me, I know quite well. But if someone asks me, I cannot say." Just to say something, I'll call a public intellectual someone who aspires to write for a large, non-specialist audience on subjects of general concern. I think that's enough to go on with, though you should feel free to challenge or correct it.

More to the point, perhaps, who are some exemplary public intellectuals? I'll keep to the United States; we all know about Sartre, Camus, Orwell, and other famous Europeans. In America there's Randolph Bourne, Walter Lippmann, Lewis Mumford, H. L. Mencken, and Edmund Wilson; the fabled New York intellectuals: Lionel Trilling, Philip Rahv, Dwight Macdonald, Irving Howe, Clement Greenberg, and Mary McCarthy; the Cold War liberals: Arthur Schlesinger Jr, Richard Hofstadter, and Daniel Bell; the New Left: C. Wright Mills, I. F Stone, Noam Chomsky, Paul Goodman, Michael Harrington; the conservatives: William F. Buckley, James Burnham, and George Will; and intellectuals of no particular school: Hannah Arendt, Susan Sontag, and Gore Vidal. And contemporaries? I suppose Pankaj Mishra, Adam Shatz, Arundhati Roy, David Bromwich, Samuel Moyn, Christopher Caldwell.

It's a long list, and even a few words about each of them would fill out my time and more. Instead I'd like to offer a few observations about the changing ecology of public intellectuals, about some alterations in the conditions in which we practice our vocation.

As Russell Jacoby wrote in The Last Intellectuals - still the best book on the subject - the living conditions of 20th-century American intellectuals were disrupted by "the restructuring of the cities, the passing of bohemia, and the expansion of the university." Cheap, comfortable urban space, where the temporarily marginal can congregate, no longer exists. Undemanding part-time work - library attendant, bookstore clerk, security guard, clerical worker - the kind of job I did at this university for 35 years and that made my own writing possible - has been downsized or outsourced out of existence. Print or online, little magazines and local newspapers can rarely afford to pay their contributors more than nominally. The spectacular postwar growth of higher education sucked virtually an entire generation of intellectuals into college teaching; a shrinking job market only reinforced their academic socialization, which emphasized specialization and deference, neither of which is characteristic of public intellectuals.

What lies behind this secular change in the situation of intellectuals is the long - now fifty years long - ascendancy of neoliberalism. What is neoliberalism? It is the extension of market dominance to all spheres of social life, fostered and enforced by the state. In economic policy, this means deregulation, privatization, and financialization. In culture, it means untrammeled marketing and the commoditization of everyday life, including the intimate sphere. In law, it means consumer sovereignty and a restrictive conception of the public interest. In education, it means the replacement of public by private (i.e., business) support for schools, universities, and research, with a corresponding shift of influence over hiring, curriculum and research. In civil society, it means private control over the media and private funding of political parties, with the resulting control of both by business and the ultra-rich. The upshot of this political-economic regime is prosperity for Wall Street, Big Tech, and a few other favored industries. For intellectuals - at least those who have not sold themselves to business or the state, which is actually a pretty good definition of public intellectuals - it means austerity, a squeezing of the creative economy, which is a gift economy, the antithesis of a market economy. For everyone, it means a narrowing of horizons.

Students, especially, are affected: the panic currently raging among the young about their career prospects could not be a more effective de-radicalizing agent - could not be more unfavorable for producing public intellectuals - if it had been designed for that purpose by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. According to a recent Crimson article, in 1965 - my freshman year at Harvard, as it happens - 85 percent of entering freshmen said that developing a philosophy of life was one of their most important goals, and 35 percent said that being well-off financially was one of their most important goals. In 2020, 85 percent said being well-off financially was one of their most important goals, and only 40 percent said that developing a philosophy of life was. The result of these changed priorities, according to some other Crimson articles, is that extracurriculars increasingly take precedence over coursework, and even course attendance. The ideal of a college education, as it has been traditionally understood, consists in engaging with small groups of peers under the supervision of a skilled and devoted teacher and discussing ideas and works of art that force each student to consider the purpose of his or her life and the validity of his or her fundamental assumptions. My generation of Harvard students, by and large, was fortunate enough to have that experience. My impression, though I cannot judge with any certainty, is that your generation is less fortunate in this respect. If so, blame neoliberalism.

Can social media make up this loss? No doubt it can help. But it is an inherently centrifugal experience, dispersing one's attention in the very act of increasing one's interlocutors and abolishing the indispensable role of the teacher, the skilled and devoted guide. A liberal education concentrates and integrates; social media extends but fragments. If one has gone through the rigorous formative process of a liberal education, social media can be stimulating and enlarging. If not, it is apt to be a snare.

I dedicated The Sealed Envelope to the memory of three of the foremost public intellectuals of the last few decades, and I'd like to say a little about each of them, partly to pay tribute and partly to say what I think we're talking about, or should be talking about, when we talk about public intellectuals.

Barbara Ehrenreich came as close to my ideal of a public intellectual as anyone else in my lifetime, writing about anthropology, culture, sexual politics, political economy, and everything else under the sun with wit and brio.  The most popular and influential of her many books was Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting by in America. Sociologists and anthropologists have sometimes gone underground in order to capture aspects of life normally hidden to middle-class readers; but it's safe to say that none have turned in an account written with such verve and generosity. In 2000, after Bill Clinton's historic welfare reform had greatly expanded the ranks of the poor, Ehrenreich decided that, as a citizen, a writer, and a radical, she ought to find out, and report, what life in America is like on the minimum wage. So she spent several months in various parts of the country as a waitress, a housecleaner, and a clerk at Walmart, living (very uncomfortably) solely on her earnings. The book is full of barbed humor, aimed mostly at herself, but her conclusion is perfectly serious:

When someone works for less pay than she can live on ...  then she has made a great sacrifice for you, she has made you a gift of some part of her abilities, her health, and her life. The working poor are in fact the major philanthropists of our society. They neglect their own children so that the children of others will be cared for; they live in substandard housing so that other homes will be shiny and perfect; they endure privation so that inflation will be low and stock prices high. To be a member of the working poor is to be a nameless benefactor to everyone else.

The historian Christopher Lasch fused intellectual history, psychoanalytic theory, sociological analysis, and political polemic into an exceptionally intricate and wide-ranging critique. Lasch's work is an extended quarrel with modernity, which he portrayed as an overlapping, mutually reinforcing phalanx of political centralization, mass production, expanded consumption, automation, geographical mobility, the bureaucratization of education, medicine, and family life, moral cosmopolitanism, and legal universalism. Against that barrage of supposedly benign abstractions, Lasch insisted on the fact of human scale. The human creature has a specific evolutionary endowment and gestational history. As a result, the human infant has a powerful and threatening fantasy life, which it can only outgrow gradually, through a range of close-up interactions, involving both love and discipline, with the same caregivers over many years. The bureaucratic rationalization of work and intimate life plays havoc with this scheme of development, producing a weak self, stripped of traditional skills, tools, and autonomy, entirely dependent on large forces beyond its comprehension, much less control, and crippled by ambivalence toward remote, impersonal authority. What sustained the strong pre-modern self, Lasch believed, was the virtue of hope; what sustains the weak modern self is the ideology of progress.

Richard Rorty, by contrast, was an arch-modernist. He devoted the first half of his career to reformulating, wryly but rigorously, the philosophical pragmatism of William James and John Dewey. Later on, surveying the rubble of our moral and intellectual culture and wanting to give the disenchanted something to hold on to amid the gale winds of nihilism, he wrote an exquisite book, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. After explaining why morality cannot be grounded in either religion or reason, he goes on to explain how it might be grounded - provisionally:

... not by inquiry but by imagination, the imaginative ability to see strangers as fellow sufferers. Solidarity is not discovered by [philosophical] reflection but created. It is created by increasing our sensitivity to the particular details of the pain and humiliation of other, unfamiliar sorts of people.

Imagination, sympathy, solidarity - by whatever name: this is the true engine of political progress, not any grand theory.

         Two of Rorty's books featured the word "hope" in their title: Philosophy and Social Hope (1999) and the posthumous What Can We Hope For? (2022). He knew how difficult an achievement democracy is, and how fragile once achieved; indeed, he famously warned that if the left did not reach out to the angry and disaffected white working class, an authoritarian strongman would. Even a philosopher can sometimes be clear-eyed. But his optimism went deep, all the way back to Walt Whitman's great essay Democratic Vistas. It was Whitman's generous vision of American possibilities that Rorty tried to keep alive in what he recognized was an age sadly lacking in solidarity and fraternity.

What sustains hope, for me, in these dark times is a metaphor of Rilke's. In Letters to a Young Poet, he writes that love is a form of knowledge, and that a single act of creation is the fruit of "a thousand forgotten nights of love." He hopes lovers will be solemn and responsible as well as joyful, but reassures his youthful correspondent that, even when they are selfish or careless, their passion is not wholly dissipated but is passed down to the future, despite themselves, as though in a sealed envelope. That is also something public intellectuals can do.

"Poetry makes nothing happen," W.H. Auden wrote; and neither does philosophy, according to Richard Rorty (1931-2007), the most prominent pragmatist philosopher of the late 20^th century. Rorty's pragmatism was the culmination of a long devolution, which amounts to this: philosophically, less and less is at stake. Getting ontology and epistemology right was for most of human history considered essential to achieving one's eternal salvation, and sometimes also had drastic consequences for one's temporal well-being. When philosophy and religion were divorced in the early modern period, metaphysical orthodoxy was still usually thought to underwrite moral probity. Respectable people counted their spoons when a materialist, as well as an atheist, left their house. Kant was the last gasp of this ethical rationalism, ie, the belief that our values and duties may be deduced from the nature of things and are revealed to us rather than created by us.

Rorty described this development in his characteristically insouciant fashion in "Democracy and Philosophy," an essay from 2007:

Philosophy is a ladder that Western political thinking climbed up, and then shoved aside. Starting in the seventeenth century, philosophy played an important role in clearing the way for the establishment of democratic institutions in the West. It did so by secularizing political thinking - substituting questions about how human beings could lead happier lives for questions about how God's will might be done.

Philosophers suggested that people should just put religious revelation to one side, at least for political purposes, and act as if human beings were on their own - free to shape their own laws and their own institutions to suit their felt needs, free to make a fresh start.

Pragmatism, with its Greek root pragma or "act," marked a recognition that value-creation and meaning-making were active rather than passive processes, that values and meanings were made rather than discovered. It is the assertion that there is no higher philosophical or scientific authority than the temporary consensus of the competent, and no higher moral authority than uncoerced individual choice.[1]

In particular, social and political institutions are not justified by their supposed correspondence to the universally valid imperatives of an invariant human nature, for there is no such thing. Neither we nor our institutions have essences, Rorty maintained; we and they are instead centerless webs, continually reweaving new experiences into novel but (temporarily) stable selves and relations.

This picture may seem unsettling as well as liberating. To the comforting rationalist proposition that freedom, democracy, and human rights are mankind's natural endowments, Rorty replies that nothing [OMIT "NOTHING"]  there are no such natural endowments, that "human nature" is a metaphysical fiction. He draws out the ambiguous consequences of this radical contingency in his great essay "The Last Intellectual in Europe: Orwell on Cruelty."[2]

Many readers of 1984 have thought that Winston's interrogation was a little overdone, that perhaps Orwell was indulging a streak of cruelty occasionally in  evidence elsewhere in his writing. Others have supposed that we are meant to applaud Winston Smith's gallant, doomed determination to hold on to the sanity-preserving truth that "two plus two equals four." Rorty thinks otherwise: Orwell's lesson, he argues, is that there is no indomitable core of freedom and integrity [DIGNITY] in human beings; we are "socialization all the way down." There is no necessary victory of democracy over totalitarianism, whatever Western sentimentalists believe. "The Last Man in Europe," Orwell's sometime title for the novel, refers to decent, defeated Winston. Rorty's "The Last Intellectual in Europe" refers to O'Brien, the heartless pragmatist, a terrifyingly plausible portrait of the nihilism to which postmodern skepticism - Rorty's own creed - may lead. "The truth will make you free" was the motto of Enlightenment rationalism, with "virtuous" generally understood as well. But as Rorty acknowledges, and O'Brien illustrates, the truth will merely make us more efficient, whether for good or evil. Something other than truth is required to make us good.

                                    *******

Two of Rorty's political collections featured the word "hope" in their title: Philosophy and Social Hope (1999) and What Can We Hope For? (2022). He was well aware of how difficult an achievement democracy is, and how fragile once achieved. Nor did he believe that "theory" would help much. He championed the writings of Derrida, Foucault, and others for their original perspectives on Western philosophy and intellectual history. But he denied that the new ideas would lead to "liberation" or "revolution." "People on the political left ... are often disappointed by my politics, since they see the lack of social justice in modern societies as something that can only be remedied by vast structural changes, on the scale of 'the end of capitalism.' I think that this lack can be remedied, if at all, by a series of incremental reforms. I am what Marxists used to call a 'bourgeois liberal.'"[3]

When it came to specifying those injustices, there was little concrete difference between Rorty and the rest of the American left, at any rate for most of his life. He was a sharp and detailed critic of economic, sexual, and racial inequality, more so than most theoretical leftists in the English and comparative literature departments. But eventually, as "woke" thinking and rhetoric infiltrated the American left, Rorty responded critically, observing that "one of the contributions of the newer [i.e. the radical-academic] left has been to enable professors, whose mild guilt about the comfort and security of their own lives once led them into extra-academic political activity to say, 'Sorry, I gave at the office.'" [DISSENT] Even more pointedly, in his fullest political statement, Achieving Our Country (1998), he made a prediction that was to achieve posthumous celebrity on Election Day 2016:

At that point [ie, when the working class realizes that the professional class cannot or will not help them], something will crack. The non-suburban electorate will decide that the system has failed and start looking around for a strongman to vote for -- someone willing to assure them that, once he is elected, the smug bureaucrats, tricky lawyers, overpaid bond salesmen, and postmodernist professors will no longer be calling the shots. ...[4]

                                             *******

If God or human nature or Theory could not ground hope, what could? Rorty's usual answer was solidarity. Somehow - it is still not clear how - we are capable of feeling the pains and pleasures of others. To ascribe this capacity to our moral imagination does not go far to explain it. But its existence and importance are undeniable. Hume and Adam Smith called this faculty "sympathy" and based their theories of morality on it. Godwin and Shelley likewise; and Shelley's affirmation in A Defense of Poetry is particularly eloquent: "The great instrument of moral good is the imagination ... a going out of our own nature, and an identification of ourselves with the beautiful which exists in thought, action, or person not our own." Rorty tweaks this formulation: what we identify with, he thinks, is suffering, the distinctive capacity of sentient beings and our profoundest claim on one another's sympathy. To be human is to be capable of being humiliated. Democracy depends on "the ability to see more and more traditional differences (of tribe, religion, race, customs, and the like) as unimportant when compared with similarities with respect to pain and humiliation - the ability to think of people wildly different from ourselves as included in the range of 'us.'"[5]

The creation of democratic solidarity is hard work, Rorty insisted. It begins with some such sentiment as "My family member or neighbor shouldn't have to live like that," then proceeds, often only after many epochs of nation-building experiences, to a sentiment like, "No American [Frenchman, Jamaican] should have to live like that," and eventually - far in the future, alas, at the rate history is going - to universal solidary: "No human being should have to live like that." And because this process involves enlarging our moral imagination rather than making any new discoveries about the nature of the Good or the Just, the agents of progress will be primarily novelists, poets, and investigative journalists rather than philosophers or political theorists.

Rorty was an insistent gradualist, with no patience for loose talk about revolution and no interest in Marxism, much less Marxism-Leninism. But he was nevertheless a utopian, able to envisage a society beyond the restrictions of class, which seems to be an unsurpassable mental limit for most of those who call themselves liberals, as he did. "Looking Backwards from the Year 2096" (1996), a puckish but also earnest survey of three centuries (two past and one future) since the country's founding. (Part of the essay's joke - and also its seriousness - is the title's echo of Looking Backward (1889) by Edward Bellamy, one of the greatest of utopian novels.) In this essay he identified "the apparent incompatibility between capitalism and democracy" as the bane of American history and speculated on how the country might someday escape it:

Here, in the late twenty-first century, as talk of fraternity and unselfishness has replaced talk of rights, American political discourse has come to be dominated by quotations from Scripture and literature, rather than from political theorists or social scientists. Fraternity, like friendship, was not a concept that either philosophers or lawyers knew how to handle. They could formulate principles of justice, equality, and liberty, and invoke these principles when weighing hard moral or legal issues. But how to formulate a "principle of fraternity"? Fraternity is an inclination of the heart, one that produces a sense of shame at having much when others have little. It is not the sort of thing that anybody can have a theory about or that people can be argued into having.[6]

                                    *******

For all his ambivalence about philosophy as an academic enterprise, Rorty's purely philosophical writing is consummately professional. Surprisingly for a celebrity, a model public intellectual invite [INVITED] to pronounce on virtually very [EVERY] subject virtually everywhere, he seemed astonishingly well-versed in the latest scholarly work in the philosophy of mind and philosophy of language. But his political writing is pitched almost defiantly in the voice of an amateur, a citizen speaking to citizens, almost an enactment of his egalitarian ideology. Along with John Dewey, his pragmatist forebear, Walt Whitman was perhaps Rorty's favorite figure in American [INTELLECTUAL] history. It was Whitman's generous vision of American possibilities in Democratic Vistas that Rorty tried to keep alive in what he recognized was an age sorely [SADLY] lacking in solidarity and fraternity.

                                    [END]

George Scialabba's The Sealed Envelope will be published by Yale this winter.

The Myth of American Idealism: How U.S. Foreign Policy Endangers the World by Noam Chomsky and Nathan J. Robinson. Penguin Press, 416 pages, $32.

Imagine that the scales fall from the eyes of some egregious exponent of
American exceptionalism - Thomas Friedman, for example. Somehow or other, the horrendous toll of American policies in Southeast Asia, the Middle East, Africa, and Latin America since World War II is brought home to him for the first time, along with the complete lack of any relation between those policies and democracy, legality, or the welfare of the victims. Imagine also that, after donning sackcloth and ashes for an appropriate period, Friedman wishes to make reparation for the harm he had done by his cheerleading for American foreign policy over several decades.

So he writes a column expounding his new, more critical view. Unaccountably, despite his godlike status in the American commentariat, nothing happens. He is, however, summoned for a chat with the Times's executive editor, who suggests a period of rest and recuperation. Friedman declares that he has never felt better and writes another column along the same lines. This time the publisher, an old friend, takes him to lunch and probes gently for some emotional disturbance that might explain this otherwise incomprehensible behavior. Friedman tries enthusiastically but unsuccessfully to bring the publisher around to his new point of view. He then writes another column, a real stemwinder. The chairman of the board informs the publisher that he has heard expressions of concern from several fellow CEOs on the golf course and at Met galas. A few advertisers have even shifted their accounts to the Wall Street Journal. The situation is grave. Friedman has to go. The Pulitzer Committee rescinds Friedman's three Pulitzer Prizes. The Council on Foreign Relations revokes his membership. Friedman must now make a living freelancing for Jacobin, Mother Jones, and other disreputable left-wing rags.

Why, in spite of Friedman's legendary (indeed, mythical) intellect and eloquence, does his conversion have no effect in the mainstream? Because American exceptionalism does not derive its remarkable staying power from the force of arguments but rather from its serviceability to those who own the American economy and state. The actual purpose of American foreign policy, ever since the country emerged on the international scene by throttling the Philippine revolution in the early 20^th century, has been to maintain a world open to penetration and control by American corporations and financial institutions. Cheap labor, weak unions, low taxes and tariffs, few restrictions on capital movements or profit repatriation, lax environmental and occupational safety regulations - these are the ingredients of a favorable investment climate in a developing country. These measures, however, are likely to immiserate the population of that country. Naturally, the latter are prone to resist, by organizing or by electing sympathetic candidates. The. characteristic American response to such outrageous behavior (which is often labeled "Communist" in order to alarm American voters) includes: bribing venal politicians; arming and training the local military and police (with heavy emphasis on suppressing left-wing protests, which are by definition disorderly); overturning social-democratic (and even liberal-democratic) governments; installing corrupt and repressive tyrannies; and in extreme cases, sending in the Marines.

All this benevolent activity is costly. Given the extremely regressive American tax system, most of the costs of these policies are borne by the general population rather than by their main beneficiaries, the investor class. The population must be motivated to bear the necessary sacrifices. It would exceed even the matchless resources of the American public relations industry to convince the public to support murderous Third World regimes, and in some cases to carry out murder on a vast scale ourselves, merely in order to enrich the shareholders and executives of whatever American corporations and financial institutions operate in those countries (an objective often labeled "the national interest"). More elevated rationales must be found. During the Cold War, Americans had to be persuaded that such actions were necessary to keep an implacable geopolitical adversary at bay and prevent it from aiding the above-mentioned popular resistance movements. Since the Cold War, the rubric has been "democracy promotion": the purpose of American power is allegedly to defend and enlarge the international sphere of democracy, freedom and human rights. The purpose of American power is never, of course, to advance the interests of American elites, as is the case with all other great powers throughout history. This is the myth of American idealism, relentlessly demolished, region by region, policy by policy, atrocity by atrocity, in what will doubtless be Noam Chomsky's last book, co-authored with Nathan Robinson, editor of the journal Current Affairs.

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In 1948, the head of the State Department's Policy Planning Staff authored a classified memo that succinctly defined America's purpose in the postwar world:

... We have about 50 percent of the world's wealth, but only 6.3 percent of its population. ... in this situation, we cannot fail to be the object of envy and resentment. Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity without detriment to our national security. To do so we will have to dispense with all sentimentality and day-dreaming; and our attention will have to be concentrated on our immediate national objectives. We need not deceive ourselves that we can afford today the luxury of altruism and world-benefaction. ... We should cease to talk about vague and - for the Far East - unreal objectives such as human rights, the raising of living standards, and democratization. The day is not far off when we are going to have to deal in straight power concepts. The less we are then hampered by idealistic slogans, the better.

American foreign policy has rarely been so candidly characterized. The author was the universally revered George Kennan.  Kennan's call to plunder the resources of the underdeveloped world was certainly heard and answered by subsequent State Departments. He did not, however, foresee how crucial a part "idealistic slogans" would play in furthering the predatory policy he advocated.

As Chomsky and Robinson make clear, every empire has described its depredations as benefactions; every aggressor state, democratic or dictatorial, has insisted it is in pursuit of noble goals. But the self-righteousness of Americans is surely unique. Acting Secretary of State Charles Bohlen told Columbia students in 1969: "[O]ur policy is not rooted in any national material interest ... as most foreign policies of other countries in the past have been." Yale professor Michael Howard wrote: "For 200 years the United States has preserved almost unsullied the original ideals of the Enlightenment ... and above all, the universality of these values," though "it does not enjoy the place in the world that it should have earned through its achievements." The former chair of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace wrote in the New York Review of Books: "American contributions to international security, global economic growth, freedom, and human well-being have been so self-evidently unique and have been so clearly directed to others' benefit that the [United States] amounts to a different kind of country ... [which] tries to advance universal principles." Madeleine Albright rallied support for military intervention and NATO expansion by reminding Americans that "we are the indispensable nation." This is American exceptionalism at full strength, though innumerable pronouncements in the mainstream are tinged with it, typically in the form of references to our "good intentions." The purity of our intentions explains why, though America sometimes makes mistakes, we never commit crimes.

The Cold War was the main theater of American foreign policy between World War II and the fall of the Soviet Union. In American mythology, the Cold War was a titanic struggle between the Land of the Free and the Evil Empire. In reality, it was a mechanism whereby each superpower disciplined its subject populations. In the Soviet sphere, any democratic stirrings were condemned as harbingers of "capitalist restoration" and suppressed. In the American sphere, protests against exploitation and efforts at worker or peasant self-organization were labeled "communist" and suppressed.

But while the ideological function of the Cold War was similar in both spheres, the mechanisms of enforcement were not. After World War II, the USSR established client regimes in Central and Eastern Europe. From 1946 to 1989, a suffocating pall of repression descended on the region. Resistance occasionally broke out and was forcefully put down. Three thousand Hungarians were killed in the Soviet invasion of 1956, and 137 Czechs in the invasion of 1968. But except for the heroic few who persistently asserted their own or other people's rights and were consequently blacklisted or imprisoned, daily life in the Soviet satellites, however impoverished, proceeded mostly without violence.

In Central and South America, the US sphere of influence, the population was less fortunate. In numerous countries - Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, the Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Guatemala, Haiti, Honduras, Nicaragua, Uruguay, even tiny British Guiana - the US sponsored or supported violent and undemocratic but business-friendly governments. Often we actually brought such governments to power, bribing politicians, spreading disinformation, and arming and training right-wing military or paramilitary forces that routinely massacred opposition politicians, union organizers, teachers, priests, nuns, and even peasants suspected of being discontented. Traditional, exploitative ruling classes were shored up or restored to power. The cost in lives and suffering was enormous. Tens of thousands of civilians were killed by the military; tens of thousands more by paramilitaries and death squads, nearly all controlled by governments which were supported and supplied by the United States. The exception was Nicaragua, where the murderous paramilitaries, the CIA-trained contras, were attempting to overthrow the government, the only one in the hemisphere (except Cuba) not dominated by the United States.

US-Cuban relations illuminate one of the book's central arguments. When Cuba declared itself socialist after the rebels' victory in 1959, American policymakers were furious. When the US-sponsored invasion of 1961 failed, they were apoplectic. The atmosphere at the State Department, one high official recalled, was "emotional, almost savage." President Kennedy vowed to "bring the terrors of the earth" to Cuba. Robert Kennedy headed a task force aiming at "the destruction of targets important to the [Cuban] economy." A railroad bridge was blown up, a sugar warehouse was burned down, sugar shipments were contaminated, lubricating fluids for diesel engines were denatured, among other antics. "We were really doing almost anything you could dream up," a CIA official later admitted (or boasted). And then there were the blockade and sanctions.

         In 1962 a blockade and an array of harsh sanctions were instituted to "weaken the economic life of Cuba [and] bring about hunger, desperation, and [the] overthrow of the government." The first two of these goals were certainly attained. According to Amnesty International, "the embargo ... contributed to malnutrition that mainly affected women and children, poor water supply, and lack of medicine." According to the American Association of World Health, they caused "serious nutritional deficits" and "a devastating outbreak of neuropathy numbering in the tens of thousands." A "humanitarian catastrophe" was averted, the group found, only because of Cuba's exemplary medical system. The embargo and blockade - which continue - are illegal and are condemned every year by the UN General Assembly, unanimously except for Israel and the Marshall Islands.

          Why such ferocity? Cuba, like Nicaragua, is a tiny country with no strategic value and no vital resources. And Castro and the Sandinistas did not, after all, murder their citizens on anything like the scale of America's client states throughout the hemisphere. Nevertheless, this apparently irrational cruelty had its rationale. The State Department defined the "Cuban threat" as "successful defiance." Like any Mafia don - surely a just characterization of America's relationship toward the rest of the hemisphere in this period - the US can forgive much (in particular, human rights violations by its client states), but it cannot forgive disobedience. Tolerating public displays of disobedience would weaken the Don's authority.

Along with "successful defiance" as an explanatory principle of US foreign intervention there is "the threat of a good example." This is, in effect, the rational version of the "domino theory." The Soviet Union was never going to win control of one country after another and weld them into a military threat to the Free World. Soviet policy was generally ad hoc, opportunistic, and defensive, reflecting the vastly greater strength of the US; and Soviet allies in the Third World were motivated more by fear of American subversion than by an ambition to forge an Evil Empire. But even though the military-strategic importance of Vietnam, Cuba, Nicaragua, and British Guiana was negligible, they did pose a threat. If any country, particularly a small and poor one, could construct a viable, even attractive society on its own terms, free of economic dependence on the US and its international financial institutions, other nations might be encouraged to imitate them. One way to prevent this was to make benign development difficult or impossible in these would-be independent countries: for example, by dropping more bombs on Vietnam than were dropped in all of World War II, physically destroying the country and much of its population; by economic sabotage and a lethal, strangulating blockade, as in Cuba; by "making the economy scream" (Nixon) and encouraging a military coup, which was followed by the killing of thousands of leftists, as in Chile; or by recruiting, arming and directing a murderous insurgency, as in Nicaragua.

Sometimes the point is explained with great clarity. When the United States was preparing to overthrow Guatemalan democracy in 1954, a State Department official pointed out that the country's "agrarian reform is a powerful propaganda weapon," its "broad social programs of aiding the workers and peasants" having a "strong appeal" to other Central American countries with highly unequal societies. Guatemala is therefore a "threat to the stability of Honduras and El Salvador."

Larger countries with more resources were not spared. In the Congo, the US conspired with Belgium to imprison and assassinate the charismatic Patrice Lumumba, placing a murderous but cooperative kleptomaniac, Mobutu Sese Seko, in power for several decades. In Indonesia, the army was encouraged to overthrow the neutralist prime minister Sukarno, assume power, and liquidate the country's only mass political organization, the Indonesian Communist Party, killing (with the CIA's assistance) 500,000 of its members. In Iran, a popular liberal nationalist leader was toppled by a CIA/MI6-organized coup and replaced by an absolute monarch with a fearsome secret police.

"What the United States wants," Chomsky and Robinson conclude, is "stability," meaning "security for the upper classes and large foreign enterprises. If that can be achieved with formal democratic devices, all the better. If not, the 'threat to stability' posed by a good example has to be destroyed before it infects others."

Are the authors right about the meaning of "stability" in American foreign policy and the entire absence of concern for democracy? Precisely this is the subject of Chomsky's voluminous (an understatement) previous writings, especially The Political Economy of Human Rights, vol. 1 (1979, with Edward Herman), Deterring Democracy (1991), World Orders Old and New (1994), and Hegemony or Survival (2003). Amid the flood of evidence in those books, one chart near the beginning of The Political Economy of Human Rights speaks volumes about the purposes of American foreign policy. It is labeled "US Aid, Investment Climate, and Human Rights in Ten Countries." The ten countries are Brazil, Chile, Dominican Republic, Guatemala, Indonesia, Iran, Philippines, South Korea, Thailand, and Uruguay, considered over a 20-year period (1953-1973). All but one of these countries (Thailand) turned toward authoritarianism at some point in those years, measured by cancelled elections, increased number of political prisoners, and increased use of torture or death squads. Those same nine countries also took measures to attract foreign investment: i.e., favorable tax and profit repatriation laws, reduction of social welfare expenditures, and repression of labor unions. And US military and economic aid to those nine countries increased, often sharply, a pattern seen frequently in the history of US foreign relations. It looks very much as though the United States rewards countries for a favorable investment climate, and that democracy has nothing to do with it.

Far from promoting democracy, American foreign policy forces us to consider whether America is itself a democracy. What should one call a government that - whichever party is in power - continually ignores or defies public opinion on a wide range of issues? According to Chomsky and Robinson, large majorities of Americans told pollsters that they favored abiding by international law; wanted an immediate ceasefire in Gaza and an end to arming Israel carte blanche; disapproved (4 to 1) of Reagan's mining of Nicaragua's harbors; approved (by 88 percent) of the Kyoto Accords; opposed warrantless wiretapping even outside the US; strongly condemned the Iraq War once the Bush administration's pretext collapsed; and more.

Academic studies reach the same conclusion. According to John Mearsheimer, summarizing a large study: "[W]hat we discovered is that public opinion ... matters hardly at all in the decision making process. A small number of elites get together and they make the decisions." Benjamin Page and Marshall Bouton write: "[Y]ear after year, decade after decade, there have been many large gaps between the foreign policies favored by officials and those favored by the public." Their examples include strengthening the UN, accepting the World Court's jurisdiction, expanding arms control, giving up the US power to veto otherwise unanimous Security Council decisions, and a strong preference for diplomacy over force.

These results call to mind the landmark study by political scientist Martin Gilens, Affluence and Influence (2012), which demonstrated that the preferences of low-income citizens had zero effect - no influence whatever - on domestic policy formation. Perhaps the correct name for a government that allows only elite influence on policy is an oligarchy.

                                    **********

         The ability of Americans - abetted, to be sure, by media laziness and academic timidity - to ignore the crimes committed in our name undoubtedly amazes and appalls the rest of the world. How, in the absence of repression, is the trick done? Chomsky and Robinson include a short chapter on "How Mythologies Are Manufactured." Briefly: there is no conspiracy, only a series of ideological filters that screen out unacceptable messages and uncooperative personnel at every level of [THOSE] institutions crucial to the formation of public opinion. You can think of it as an invisible hand. Chomsky has addressed this subject in great detail in Manufacturing Consent (2002, with Edward Herman). However it's done, American exceptionalism continues sailing before the wind.

Chapters on the Middle East, nuclear weapons, and the climate crisis rehearse familiar albeit powerful left-wing arguments. Finally, Chomsky and Robinson return to their main thesis:

Throughout all of this [i.e., the grisly record of American barbarity chronicled in the book], the myth of American idealism has persisted. The internal records often reveal that U.S. decision-makers were motivated by nothing of the kind, that they wanted to serve "national" economic interests or protect "credibility." And yet the unshakable belief in American goodwill and generosity continues to stultify political thinking and debase political discourse. Sometimes, foreign policy is portrayed as vacillating between "Wilsonian idealism" and "Kissingerian realism." In practice, the distinctions are mostly rhetorical. Every great power toys with the rhetoric of benign intentions and sacrificing to help the world. Our belief in our own exceptionalism is the most unexceptional thing about us.

The message of this book, and of Chomsky's nearly 100 others, is: we are citizens of a lawless, violent superpower that has wrought incalculable harm but that nevertheless leaves its own citizens (for the time being, at least) extraordinarily free to protest, organize, and change policy. What we do with that freedom is all-important.

If the American public continues to be deluded and manipulated by the myth of American idealism, there is very little hope that it will wrest control of its fate from the institutions that have always shaped and continue to shape American foreign and domestic policy. Everyone can make his or her own calculation of the odds of that happening, and consequently of our civilization's survival. In my view, the odds are daunting. I would say, though, that if the world does burn or blow itself up in the next century or two, Noam Chomsky will be wholly blameless. Very few of us can say as much.

                                    [END]

George Scialabba's The Sealed Envelope: Essays will be published by Yale University Press in 2025.

                           Prologue

The scene: The Last Judgment

The characters: Jesus, seated at the right hand of the Father; the 21^st-century American Christian nationalist leadership (hereafter "the Godly").

The Godly: O Lord, we thank Thee that we were not like other men (or, needless to say, women): the woke communists, the Marxist socialists, the baby-killers, the sodomites. We strove mightily on earth to relieve the tax burdens of the suffering rich; to ignore the pleas of the presumptuous poor; to keep misguided compassion for the sick and the homeless from unbalancing the federal budget; to instill respect for the God-given authority of fathers, husbands, and policemen; and to prevent innocent children from learning about our country's sins. We hope you're pleased and will now grant us everlasting life.

Jesus: Hmm ... That isn't exactly what I had in mind. What made you think it was?

The Godly: Lord, did you not say in Matthew, chapter 13: "To them that have much, still more shall be given; while to those who have little, even that which they have shall be taken from them"? We followed your prescription faithfully.

Jesus: Actually, that was a prophecy, not a prescription. I saw that's how human history would go; I wasn't recommending it. From what other words of mine did you draw inspiration?

The Godly: Gee, we thought that was enough.

Jesus: Well, what did you make of Dives and Lazarus? Or of "sooner will a camel pass through the eye of a needle than a rich man enter heaven"? Or the story of the rich young man who came to me and said: "Master, what should I do to gain eternal life?" and to whom I said: "If you would be perfect, sell your possessions and give the proceeds to the poor."

The Godly: Did you say that?

Jesus: (Sighs deeply.) And what about my final word on the subject, that passage in the Gospel of Matthew?

When the Son of Man comes in his glory, he will say to some: "I was hungry and you fed me, thirsty and you gave me to drink, naked and you clothed me, sick and you cared for me, ignorant and you taught me. Come therefore into the Kingdom of Heaven." But to others he will say: "I was hungry and thirsty, and you passed a huge regressive tax cut; sick, and you cut a trillion dollars from Medicaid; ignorant, and you built charter schools with public money that I couldn't afford to attend. Go therefore to ... the other place."

But [the/THOSE] others said to him: "Lord, when did we see you in trouble? You know we would never have treated you like that." And Jesus replied: "As I've told you often enough, whatever you did to the least of my brethren - to the poorest of the poor - you did to me." (Matthew, ch. 25)

The Godly: Um ... that does ring a bell. But to be honest, we didn't think you were serious. After all, very few Christians before us fetishized the poor like that. Can you blame us?

(Very large dark creatures with horns and wings appear and begin carrying off the godly.)

Jesus: Yes.

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Whatever the godly's posthumous fate, it can hardly be worse than the savaging Katherine Stewart inflicts on them in Money, Lies and God. As a tableau of fatuity and fanaticism, it rivals Gibbon, though of course without the gorgeous prose. But unlike Gibbon's, the empire it describes is ascendant, not declining.

Money, Lies and God introduces us to a broad cross-section of Christian nationalism's funders, theorists, organizers, and celebrity preachers, along with the foundations behind its many journals, conferences, and academic institutions, which all together assure that every talented young person with conservative beliefs will find financial support. Intellectually, the movement is not as well provisioned as it is financially, but Stewart traces some influences, especially on the Catholic side: Leo Strauss and Carl Schmitt, the Aristotelian philosophers John Finnis and Robert George, and the theologian Michael Novak. The Claremont Institute and Hillsdale College are the movement's Ivy League, currently far more self-confident (and financially secure) than the other one.

Among Christian nationalists, Evangelical Protestants are in the majority, but traditionalist Catholics are growing in numbers and influence. Doctrinal differences are unimportant; the two groups are united behind a political agenda: a minimal role for the state in directing the economy and redistributing income; a generally skeptical attitude to regulation, including environmental protection and climate mitigation; reliance on private (usually religious) organizations to provide social services; exemption for religious employers from anti-discrimination laws; indifference or hostility to labor unions; tax and other policies promoting marriage, births, and one-career families; greater parental control over school curriculums, if not outright defunding of the public school system; and restrictions on abortion, contraception, and sex education - all of the above to be pursued through unswerving support of the Republican Party and relentless demonization of the Democratic Party. Kevin Roberts and Russell Vought, the architects of Project 2025, Trump's blueprint for dismantling the New Deal, are arch-Christian nationalists. Even before Trump came on the scene, this religious mobilization had produced a fateful result: the capture of a large majority of state legislatures in the years before the decennial 2010 redistricting, when Republicans undertook the most audacious and shameless gerrymandering in the nation's history.

One of many examples in the book of how Christian nationalism functions in practice as an arm of the Republican Party is a pep talk by Chad Connelly, a high-level Republican staffer, to a gathering at a Baptist church in Virginia. "Every church you know needs to do voter registration," he instructed listeners. "Every pastor you know needs to make sure one hundred percent of the people in their pews are voting, and voting biblical values." What are biblical values? To begin with, "the free-market system, which of course is God's biblical economy." Then follow expressions of tender solicitude for those poor sheep who have strayed from the fold. "There's a far left now that doesn't believe in God; they're godless completely. They believe the state is the supreme being. ... It's actually a godless, communistic, Marxist style of government."

John MacArthur of Grace Community Church in California, "a lion in America's Christian nationalist circles," according to Stewart, offers more ex cathedra instruction in a sermon on "The Willful Submission of a Christian Wife": "A woman's task, a woman's work, a woman's employment, a woman's calling is to be at home. Working outside removes her from under her husband and puts her under other men to whom she is forced to submit." Female speakers at religious gatherings are "a total violation of Scripture." Of course "Biblical love excludes homosexuality." [IN NOVEMBER 2020 HE ASSURED HIS FLOCK THAT "there is no pandemic."]

There are a great many more of such outlandish pronouncements in Money, Lies and God, which it would be unkind to quote. Stewart's purpose, in any case, is not to ridicule her subjects but, in a sense, to pay them tribute: they are, she argues plausibly, in a fair way to subduing liberal democracy. They are not yet a majority, but they are so well-funded and well-organized, so mistrustful of their fellow citizens, so full of passionate intensity, and so unpracticed in critical thinking - like most other Americans, in this country of eroding literacy and saturation advertising - that they may well be drafted into a replay of January 2021, when Christian nationalists overwhelmingly believed that the election had been stolen and supported - indeed partly manned - Trump's dark legions.

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While Money, Lies and God is excellent investigative reporting, it is not ethnography like, for example, Arlie Russell Hochschild's Strangers in Their Own Land. With her sharp focus on the movement's elites, Stewart does not take us deep into the homes, hearts, or histories of the movement's foot soldiers. Eighty-two percent of evangelicals, the most militantly religious group in America, voted for a compulsively dishonest, tax-cheating, would-be-election-stealing, maritally unfaithful, sexually abusive, non-churchgoer whose entire life, judging from most disinterested testimony about him, has manifested not a single religious impulse or a glimmer of moral self-awareness. Of Trump's 78 million votes - a bare 2.5 million-vote majority - evangelicals contributed 30 million votes: 40 percent of his total. Was this purely transactional - a swap of votes for Supreme Court seats? Do they really not care a scrap about Trump's (and the Republican Party's) appalling lack of character? What do they care about?

I have not spoken with the foot soldiers, so I can only guess. The excesses of wokeness and DEI are undoubtedly part of the story (that much is clear from Hochschild's book), but I suspect that near the core of their motivation lie fear and resentment of the 1960s. Not, of course, the actual 1960s but the lurid political-sexual fever-dream first conjured up by Richard Nixon and Merle Haggard and kept vividly alive in the imagination of conservative voters by every Republican candidate and consultant since. As with any successful deception, there was a grain of plausibility to the caricature: the young protagonists of feminism and the New Left did indeed overreact to their discovery of racism, imperialism, and sexual hypocrisy. But a mature society could have absorbed their indignation and calmed them down. Unfortunately, then as now, Republicans could not resist an opportunity for demagoguery, and ordinary Americans were gullible.

If fear of psychic and social chaos is at the root of right-wing religious mobilization, what follows? We are all afraid of chaos, or should be, and of course we must defend the rights of racial and sexual minorities and immigrants, even if our fellow citizens are in a panic about them. But we can at least try to locate some common ground before going on the attack. We're all Americans, after all, and debating what that means could be the beginning of reconciliation.

Other difficult questions lurk at the margins of Stewart's account. Constitutional questions, for example: how strictly should - or can - the separation of church and state be enforced? If tax-exempt organizations are prohibited from engaging in political activities, should they also be prohibited from engaging in religious activities? Why is it unlawful to refuse to rent an apartment to a black couple but lawful to refuse to make a wedding cake for a gay couple? When the Constitution is not wholly unambiguous, who should decide: should there be fifty different forums, as Justice Alito declared in Dobbs, even though the country is many orders of magnitude more integrated than it was 250 years ago?

There are also philosophical questions: what is the difference between "religious" and "moral," and what, if any, are the relations of dependence between them? Should the state promote specific virtues and values? Is strict religious or moral neutrality possible: given that it is impossible not to have opinions about what is good, is it possible to keep those opinions from influencing one's preferences as a citizen or a legislator?

These questions mostly remain in the background of Money, Lies and God, as does another one, which I imagine Stewart's subjects would want to press on her: how much is the movement she chronicles a threat to democracy, and how much is it an expression of democracy? Her own answer is emphatic: "The movement described in this book isn't looking for a seat at the noisy table of American democracy; it wants to burn down the house." It certainly does reject the Enlightenment root and branch, including religious toleration, which most Americans still consider a bedrock national ideal. And yet the movement is very broad-based; it is spread by persuasion; and it is focused almost exclusively on winning elections, even if (like the Tea Party before them) they are largely financed by plutocrats for [their/THE LATTER'S own purposes and even if their chosen vessel, the Republican Party, is not very scrupulous about making sure the ungodly (or the non-white) can participate in those elections. Liberals have always fallen back on the Constitution, which unambiguously prescribes the separation of church and state, whatever conservative sophists may allege. But the Constitution, though a mighty fortress, is not impregnable, especially when interpreted idiosyncratically by an extremist Supreme Court, as it has been recently in such matters as gun control, political spending, and the power of regulatory agencies. Large enough majorities can change the Constitution, in any case, and at the rate Christian nationalism is growing, it may eventually achieve such majorities.

The last rampart of freedom is not lawsuits but democratic debate. Liberals can and should oppose the overweening claims of Christian nationalists in the courts, but finally we will have to meet and persuade them face to face, without lawyers in the room. If we lose that argument, and freedom is temporarily eclipsed in America, our example of democratic openness will nevertheless be the best contribution we can make to its eventual rebirth.

                                    [END]

George Scialabba's most recent book is Only a Voice: Essays.

What is woke, anyway? For the average pundit, it's the pretension to a superior wisdom or a more fervent dedication in regard to racial and sexual justice. About economic equality and procedural democracy, woke doesn't have much to say; but about perceived disrespect in matters of ethnicity or gender, it can't say enough. An abundance of zeal and a lack of proportion have made woke - or identity politics, a roughly equivalent term - something between a laughingstock and a bugbear among the American public at large.

That is Woke 2.0 - sanctimony, which is what pretty much what everyone now means by the word. But there is, or was, another "woke," Woke 1.0, of which the second is a sarcastic derivative, like "hippy" from "hip." Woke 1.0 was in fact a kind of hipness: a genuine sensitivity to the multifarious ways ethnicity and gender can give rise to irritation or even conflict within groups or institutions. It just meant "smart about the briar patch of identity."

So what does the title of this book mean? Have we never been Woke 1.0 or Woke 2.0? Neither, exactly. "We," in this case, is not everyone but "symbolic capitalists": professionals, practitioners of identity politics, members of the intellectual/cultural/service/non-manufacturing economy who (professedly) aspire to advance equality and social justice. They (we) have failed, and it's our own fault:

The problem, in short, is not that symbolic capitalists are too woke, but that we've never been woke. The problem is not that causes like feminism, antiracism, or LGBTQ rights are "bad." The problem is that, in the name of these very causes, symbolic capitalists regularly engage in behaviors that exploit, perpetuate, exacerbate, reinforce, and mystify inequalities - often to the detriment of the very people we purport to champion. And our sincere commitment to social justice lends an unearned and unfortunate sense of morality to these endeavors.

It seems, then, that the "woke" we have never been is something like "awake to the self-defeating (and self-aggrandizing) nature of our (purported) efforts toward justice." We Have Never Been Woke, by the young sociologist Musa al-Gharbi, is a wake-up call.

The book's main analytic category is "symbolic capital." Symbolic capitalists are "professionals who traffic in symbols and rhetoric, images and narratives, data and analysis, ideas and abstractions, as opposed to workers engaged in manual forms of labor tied to goods and services." Not to be difficult, but why call them "symbolic capitalists" rather than "symbolic workers"? We don't call factory workers "physical capitalists," even though they work on and with physical capital. There's a vital difference, after all, between capitalists and workers: capitalists jointly own their society and control the livelihood of everyone in it (except the self-employed). Professionals who "traffic in symbols, etc." control no one's livelihood (except perhaps for their immediate colleagues); and if they all marched into the sea tomorrow, capital would yawn and hire replacements.

Al-Gharbi insists, on the contrary, that symbolic capitalists are far more powerful than generally recognized. "Decision-making in the political sphere, the private sector, the nonprofit world, and beyond is increasingly informed and constrained by unelected, minimally accountable, largely nontransparent experts and administrators." The word doing all the work here is "accountable." These experts and administrators may be unaccountable to the public, but they are certainly accountable to the plutocrats above them, who set the framework of policy. Symbolic capitalists "shape the system in accordance with [their] own tastes and desires, independent of, and sometimes in conflict with, the preferences and priorities of super-elites." Really? A junior executive at a hedge fund who urges socially responsible investing a little too persistently will soon be unemployed. A Pentagon consultant who recommends against an expensive new weapon that is the apple of the Army's or Navy's eye will no longer be consulted. A publisher who promotes a crusade against the scandalous carried interest deduction is liable to be rebuked or removed if one of his paper's directors happens to make use of the deduction. Symbolic capitalists can "shape" and "constrain" only to the extent they further the goals of those with the power to set system- or institution-wide goals - i.e., real capitalists.

Much of We Have Never Been Woke is devoted to illustrating how symbolic capitalists advance their own interests while claiming to serve the general interest. This may be true, but many if not most other groups advance their own interests while claiming to serve the general interest: pharmaceutical executives, private equity pirates, Pentagon brass, politicians, and so on. Actually, I'm not sure al-Gharbi believes there is a general interest. He quotes Max Weber approvingly: "In truth - let's be honest with ourselves - this belief in the cause, as subjectively sincere as it may be, is almost always a 'moral legitimation' for the desire for power, revenge, booty, and benefits." That sounds admirably tough-minded, but it fails to account for Eugene Debs or George Orwell, Dorothy Day or Simone Weil, Ralph Nader or Daniel Ellsberg, or many thousands of other, less celebrated people. Generosity and solidarity are as much facts of human nature as the desire for booty and benefits.

Keen to demystify "popular" movements, Al-Gharbi points to studies showing that participants in Occupy Wall Street and subsequent movements (the Women's March, the March for Racial Justice, etc.) were "majority white ... extremely well-educated ... and overwhelmingly left-leaning." This shows that those movements were not "broad-based." But most people in 21sr-century America who can take time off from work at will without fearing for their jobs and who can easily find bail or legal help if they are arrested are young, white, and college students or college-educated. Perhaps that's why they're the majority of people at most daytime or multi-day demonstrations. Working people, even if they can get off work, are often too tired to demonstrate, don't know the lingo, and are understandably reluctant to get arrested.

Al-Gharbi squarely poses the question: if symbolic capitalists are really as dedicated to bringing about equality and justice as as they claim, why is there so little equality and justice? After all, the "one percent" leftists are always whining about only control 26 percent of the country's wealth, while the next 19 percent, where the symbolic capitalists dwell, control 45 percent. AGAIN, AL-GHARBI GREATLY OVERESTIMATES THE POWER OF SYMBOLIC CAPITALISTS (LEAVING ASIDE THE QUESTION OF THEIR DEDCATION). IT'S MUCH EASIER for one percent of shareholders with 26 percent of voting stock to control corporate policy than for 19 percent of shareholders with 45 percent of stock or, for that matter, 99 percent of shareholders with 74 percent of stock. The reason is obvious: coordination. It is far easier for a small but powerful minority to define and enforce a unity of purpose and strategy than for a larger, more diffuse minority or, a fortiori, a large majority.

Al-Gharbi's explanation is different: not structural but psychological.

We really want the poor to be uplifted. We want the oppressed to be liberated. We want the marginalized to be integrated. However, we'd prefer to find a way to achieve these goals without having to sacrifice anything personally or change anything about our own lives or aspirations. Symbolic capitalists simultaneously desire to be social climbers and egalitarians. We want to mitigate inequalities while also preserving or enhancing our elite position (and ensure our children can reproduce or exceed our position).

"These drives," he announces triumphantly, "are in fundamental tension." Social scientists love to find fundamental tensions and are allergic to radical simplicities. But the truth in this case is radical and simple: individual action avails precisely nothing against the vast, entrenched, amply financed, and highly coordinated structures of power in a mature capitalist society unless aggregated into equally large and well-coordinated countervailing structures, a process that, like capitalist consolidation, takes many generations, a great deal of money, AND, YES, FAR MORE DEDICATION THAN WOKE PROFESSIONALS GENERALLY DISPLAY. Of course we should all acknowledge our conflicting goals and, yes, tensions. But they are not the main obstacle to social change.

I SHARE AL-GHARBI'S CYNICISM ABOUT WOKE PROFESSIONALS. BUT HE EXTENDS IT INDISCRIMINATELY, TO ALL LEFT-WING ACTIVISTS. In his Conclusion, discussing environmentalism, he remarks disparagingly: "Much like other social justice causes, environmentalism is regularly used as a means to feel morally and intellectually superior to others, engage in moral licensing, and mystify social processes. Environmentalism is likewise tied to power and authority claims (i.e., if you don't behave in the ways I find palatable, profess the things I believe, or otherwise comply with my own tastes, priorities, and preferences, then we'll all be underwater in ten years)." Is this sarcastic tone warranted? I'm sure al-Gharbi agrees that without substantial policy changes, several large coastal cities around the world will indeed be under water by the end of this century, which, along with famine, drought, disease, and severe weather, is likely to produce mass migrations that will dwarf all others so far, as well as accelerated species extinction and an unstoppable momentum toward further catastrophes in the next century. If he were arguing that environmentalism is less successful than it might be because of the bad habits of environmentalists, I would listen willingly. But he seems to be saying that environmental destruction, as well as economic and racial and sexual inequality, however sincerely symbolic capitalists claim to oppose them, are ultimately just arenas for their self-advancement. No doubt there are examples; we all know and detest social justice entrepreneurs. But 350.org, Pro Publica, the Economic Policy Institute, Amnesty International, Greenpeace, Public Citizen, Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, the Center for Science in the Public Interest, and hundreds of other non-profits - including little magazines like this one - have done an immense amount of good without ever promising to make their members rich or famous.

I don't mean to dismiss We Have Never Been Woke. Al-Gharbi is obviously intelligent and energetic; he has gathered a lot of interesting data, organized it well, and written it up clearly and forcefully, except for occasional sentences like this one: "Meanwhile, heightened demographic inclusion has been accompanied by a growing homogenization of identity, and increased parochialism against divergent perspectives (including and especially with respect to minority group members who reject institutionally dominant narratives on identity issues.)" Such sentences are apparently considered evidence of intellectual heft by tenure committees, which are a necessary rite of passage for young symbolic capitalists like al-Gharbi.

For what it's worth, I hope he gets tenure, and sooner rather than later. Because the sooner he gets tenure, the sooner he can dump the jargon and instead employ vivid examples, colorful anecdotes, and direct, pungent language, all of which are frowned on by the gatekeepers of every social science. I strongly suspect that there is a social critic in al-Gharbi struggling to break free of the sociologist. If so, I wish him Godspeed.

                                    [END]

George Scialabba is a frequent contributor to Commonweal. His essay collection, The Sealed Envelope, will be published in 2025.

The passage from Enlightenment to Romanticism at the end of the 18^th century was perhaps the most deeply felt crisis in European intellectual history. The Age of Reason had seen such extraordinary strides in scientific discovery and political liberty that the future progress of both mind and society seemed, to many, already marked out. Two groups of people were unhappy about this. Traditionalists, both religious and political, regarded the party of Reason as a nuisance, to be swatted away rather than argued with in earnest. The Enlightenment's scientific materialism and anti-authoritarianism seemed to them sheer perversity, old heresies in a new garb.  But by the time the party of Reason morphed into the party of Revolution, it was too late for swatting; and by the mid-19^th century the traditionalists had retreated into a long defensive crouch that lasted until quite recently.

The Romantics' quarrel with the Enlightenment was more intimate and impassioned. The Romantics embraced Enlightenment rationalism, as far as it went, but protested that it left many important questions unanswered. "Is that all?" the 19^th century rebuked the 18^th. "How does your Reason account for Spirit, Beauty, Community, Art? Why are Intuition and Imagination not equally valid sources of truth?" The Enlightenment delighted in the universal, in showing what was true of all human beings in all times and places. Romantics thought the most interesting truths about humans were local and particular, accessible only to those with a deep knowledge of a people's history and culture. The Enlightenment aspired to system: to theories that were logically consistent and complete. The Romantics thought that uniqueness, incompleteness, and idiosyncrasy were more dependable guides to truth.  The Enlightenment thought that Reason was autonomous, a disinterested power of reflection, capable of judging objectively and impartially. The Romantics asked why Reason alone should be immune from distorting material influences, like instinct, desire, and custom. The Enlightenment prized transparency, dreaming of a language free of ambiguity. The Romantics insisted that languages are organic, polyvalent, and opaque. The Enlightenment exalted individual rights, self-interest, and negative freedoms. The Romantics countered that our identities are social before they are individual and that rational self-interest is by no means our most important motive.

Naturally, these differences played out over many realms: politics, philosophy, science, art. One of the most fruitful fields of Romantic innovation was the theory and practice of poetry. The classical and neoclassical poet was a craftsman: he tried to limit ambiguity, strangeness, and excess; to make sure metaphors and other imagery were intelligible and consistent; to avoid drawing too frequent attention to himself; and to master the disciplines of meter, rhyme, and diction. "Invention" - cleverness or ingenuity - was praised, but originality must be limited; the poet was not expected to break the mold of poetic tradition. Of course emotion was not prohibited; poetry can hardly be written without it. But balance, measure, and control were the fundamental premises, the characteristic notes, of pre-Romantic poetry.

Romanticism drastically reconceived the role of the poet. In parallel with the revolution in German philosophy at the time, the Romantics theorized that the mind of the poet was not merely a passive receptor of sense impressions but rather was something alive, growing, and highly individuated, which shaped its own perceptions in something like the way the German Idealists claimed that Mind partly originated sense impressions and ideas. The poet (painter, composer) was no longer a craftsman but was now a creator. The hint of (semi-) divinity in that term contributed to the mystique that frequently surrounded Romantic artists; while the critical ascription of "inwardness" and "depth" to their art lent them a new prestige.

Whenever in his long career he has encountered a momentous cultural-historical change, Charles Taylor's characteristic response has been to write a monumental book. About the emergence of the modern self from the ascriptive pre-modern self, defined by privileges, duties, and one's place in the order of being, he wrote Sources of the Self (1989). About the multi-faceted evolution from an epoch of belief to an epoch of unbelief, he wrote the massive A Secular Age (2007). His new book, Cosmic Connections, develops at great length one of the themes of A Secular Age, the Romantic reaction against the Enlightenment, especially as embodied in the very rich corpus of German and English Romantic poetry.

Cosmic Connections is an immensely ambitious book, like its distinguished predecessors. It is also, like them, immensely difficult, perhaps unavoidably so - though perhaps not. Taylor writes in a loose, discursive, allusive, almost absent-minded style. An uncharitable (and alliteration-besotted) reviewer might describe it as wordy, woolly, and wandering. It would, admittedly, require a superhuman degree of literary skill to render a searching discussion of such subtle and profound matters consistently intelligible, and Taylor is only human. But while I have often found it difficult to follow Taylor, I have never doubted it was worth trying. His philosophical antithesis, Richard Rorty, wrote of Taylor: "He is attempting nothing less than a synthesis of moral reflection and intellectual history, one which will do for our time what Hegel did for his."

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A critic of poetry need not have a philosophy of language, but a theorist of poetry probably does. Amplifying ideas he broached in The Language Animal (2016), Taylor distinguishes "designative-instrumental" from "expressive-constitutive" language. The former is the default, everyday version, mapping signs straightforwardly onto meanings. But new experiences strain the adequacy of our maps; we need new, constitutive language to fully articulate new meanings, especially ineffable ones. Part of Taylor's purpose in Cosmic Connections is to rescue the indefinable (or at any rate undefined) terms that many Romantic poets gave to their crucial experiences - Wordsworth's "spirit," Holderlin's "gods," Rilke's "angels" - from condescension or dismissal by skeptical materialists.

When we shuffled off our pre-modern superstitions - e.g., that animals have souls, that certain sacred spaces emanate power, that the cosmos is a Great Chain of Being - rationalists overlooked the possibility that our ancestors were not deluded but only inarticulate. The Romantics did not. They also experienced disenchantment, but unlike skeptical rationalists, could not rest in it. "Romantic art as a response to the loss of cosmic orders begets the aspiration to reconnect." [89] The Romantics looked to perennial human intuitions and instincts for hints about meta-physical (though not necessarily metaphysical) ethical and psychological meanings, a "deeper order of things," with which poetry could help them reconnect.

Cosmic Connections opens a new front in Taylor's long war against reductionism. Our responses to art are not objective, but neither are they mere "varieties of subjective feeling." Romantic art "convinces us through moving us." Its "epiphanic invocations of order are like flashes of insight, which are incomplete and, in the nature of things, ultimately uncompletable." Although "they can never enjoy the status of firm, indubitable truths," they are "facts of experience, which cannot be simply ignored." It sounds as much like religious experience as aesthetic experience. [86, 87, 89]

In fact, the influential modernist poet and critic T.E. Hulme disparagingly referred to Romanticism as "spilt religion." That is, however, what Taylor admires about it. Immemorial understandings of the cosmos had, it seemed, been irretrievably shattered. The Romantics felt this far too deeply to ignore or shrug off; they had to grope for cosmic connections. As a result, "their poetry offers the experience of order without claiming the confirmation of its truth that an underlying story (theistic or other) would give it."[138]

Taylor applies this model of poetry, as an ardent but inevitably partial and unconsummated reconnection with Nature or with lost wisdom, to a remarkable range of Romantic and post-Romantic poets: Holderlin, Novalis, Blake, Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats, Hopkins, Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Rilke, Eliot, and Milosz. Some of his readings are more convincing than others. In discussing Goethe's famous "Wanderers Nachtlied," he brings out the echoing resonances of the poem's key word, Ruh (peace). He returns often to Wordsworth's "Tintern Abbey," finding in its climactic lines ("A motion and a spirit that impels/All thinking things, all objects of thought,/And rolls through all things") a poignant attempt to articulate an intuition, or hope, that Nature is alive and harbors a "spirit." But he is no more successful than his innumerable predecessors in explaining Keats's "'Beauty is truth, truth beauty' - that is all/Ye know on earth and all ye need to know." The famous couplet, he insists, "was much more than a throwaway flourish. Beauty and Truth come into existence together. Art raises the object to a new unity and intensity, which constitutes Beauty. But this is not something which just exists in the mind of the artist (or reader); it has reality, and hence Truth, even though this reality is partly brought to fruition by artistic (re)creation." [144] Or maybe it was just a throwaway flourish.

Taylor has obviously been deeply moved by the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins, and his chapter on Hopkins is, in consequence, the most satisfying in the book. Commenting on "The Windhover," he makes one of his clearest and most penetrating claims about the noetic stance of post-Romantic poetry:

Poetry goes beyond creating a mood, an atmosphere of feeling, and claims to give access to the inner force in a thing, not by describing it, but by making it palpable. ... Articulating the inscape of the windhover is not capturing a "takeaway" message. It is articulating the way the rhythm of that being resonates in us. (177-8)

Taylor claims to find "an interesting relationship between the notion of 'inscape' ... and the development of Rilke's poetry," [191] but he doesn't really demonstrate any convincing continuities between these two very different poets, one of them exuberant, even ecstatic, the other profoundly elusive. The long chapters on Baudelaire and Mallarmé are richly informative, though only tenuous connections are made with the book's earlier themes of cosmic connection and epistemic retreat. T.S. Eliot's poetry, he writes, in particular The Waste Land, "abandoned ... post-Romantic attempts to invoke and thus reconnect with a cosmic order occluded through disenchantment." [503] Though Eliot was religious, the connection he sought and advocated in his poetry and criticism was not with cosmic order but with Tradition, the presence of the past within the present, or in his celebrated formulation: "a feeling that the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer and within it the whole literature of his own country has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order." [504]

A chapter on Milosz finds some of the same ontological and epistemological preoccupations as in previous subjects but is more concerned with history and politics, above all with the defense of spirit against the threats and seductions of an aggressively godless world. Simone Weil, a favorite of Milosz (and Taylor) is invoked frequently. "The vision of history," Taylor writes, "has to be shot through with a sense of the spiritual being who must live in it. ... The daring idea that Milosz puts forward is that a poet can do that. ... This would mean articulating a powerful and inspiring intuition - here about a possible way forward - by sensing and then rendering its thrust and rhythm." [543] Poetic means to a political - though not merely political - end.

                                  **************

The book's last two chapters ask what all the preceding speculations and analyses have to say about "history and the present." How do they contribute to our ethical growth? They teach us, he answers, to look for dialectical rather than linear moral progress, made up of victories reversed and defeats redeemed. This is the "spiral path" proposed by Hegel and other idealist philosophers, which Taylor adumbrated earlier in the book. But otherwise, these two chapters feel a little tacked-on. Taylor's politics are humane and wise, but unfortunately, like many philosophers, he feels the need to give them a philosophical grounding.

"Clearly," he writes, "to understand this ethical growth we have to suppose an Aristotle-type theory of the human Form, a set of innate goals which demand fulfillment." [554] It's regrettable that Taylor should invoke that most archaic of philosophical notions: the human telos. According to Aristotle, there is one human telos, corresponding to invariant human nature. There is not a contingent, or individual, telos for each human being. Individuals do not choose their telos, or purpose; they learn it from their elders. Now while it is certainly true that, like every other animal, humans have "innate goals" - though not always the same goals, since our genetic endowments vary - they come from millions of years of biological and social evolution, not from an ahistorical metaphysical Form. Our purposes do not --cannot - pre-exist us; we choose them, after deliberation and painful experience. The same is true of societies.

Sadly, Taylor cannot resist the all-too-common temptation to blame the Enlightenment for an alleged "tendency to overreach and to limit and even repress human freedom," which "reaches its apogee in Bolshevik Leninism, in a disordered paroxysm of 'liquidation' under Stalin and Mao, and a horrifying invasive systematicity under Xi." [567] The idea that Voltaire, Diderot, Paine, Priestley, and Hume are forerunners of Lenin, Stalin, Mao, and Xi Jinping, though extremely far-fetched, dies hard.

Nevertheless, nine-tenths of Cosmic Connections is an extraordinarily original, ambitious, and erudite effort to excavate the roots of Romanticism and place it in new and vital relations with the rest of Western (and not solely Western) culture. Taken together with Sources of the Self, A Secular Age, and The Language Animal, it's a cosmic achievement.

                                    [END]

George Scialabba's The Sealed Envelope will be published next year by Yale University Press.

Opus: The Cult of Dark Money, Human Trafficking, and Right-Wing Conspiracy Inside the Catholic Church by Gareth Gore. Simon & Schuster, 448 pages. 2024.

Tantum religio potuit suadere malorum, said the first-century BC Roman poet Lucretius. "Only religion can move men to such wickedness."  He didn't know a tenth of it. From the biblical slaughter of the Amalekites to pagans persecuting Christians before the Emperor Constantine was baptized to Christians persecuting pagans (and other Christians) afterward to the Crusades to the post-Reformation wars and inquisitions to the Spaniards' evangelization of the New World and countless other dark passages in history, it is astonishing how eager believers have been to maim or murder one another other for the greater glory of God.

In light of all that mayhem, perhaps one shouldn't be too horrified when a religious organization is guilty of nothing worse than vast financial sleight-of-hand, assiduously courting the rich and powerful, and economically exploiting thousands of young female members, all the while skillfully projecting a flattering and self-serving image of itself to potential members and donors. Opus Dei, the organization in question, has not, after all, beheaded anyone or burned anyone at the stake.

The story of Opus Dei, the controversial lay Catholic society, has often been told, but never so thoroughly, at least in English. Opus, written by the financial journalist Gareth Gore, is a solidly researched work and will undoubtedly survive the public-relations, and even legal, blitz that Opus Dei will surely mount against it. (Though the author sometimes leans a little heavily on the rhetoric: "fueling deep divisions [and] ripping our society apart"; "aAs the rest of the world shrunk in horror  . . ...." A slightly more restrained tone would have communicated his indignation just as effectively.) Gore is a longtime reporter and editor for the London-based International Financing Review, a journal covering global capital markets. He had spent nearly a decade reporting on bank closures in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis when Banco Popular, one of Spain's largest banks, closed in 2017. At first Gore, like the rest of the international financial press corps, saw nothing out of the ordinary about Popular's closing, and moved on. Then he noticed that while other shareholders were clamoring for restitution, the largest shareholder, an anonymous entity called The Syndicate, was quietly moving to dissolve itself and disappear. His curiosity was piqued.

The Syndicate was a "nest of Russian dolls[2] ": dozens of companies and foundations with innocuous-sounding names and overlapping directors. All their funds came from the Syndicate[3] , and all of the Syndicate's funds were dividends from its Banco Popular shares. The money it disbursed to its subsidiaries--and to hundreds of "support companies" throughout the world--was spent on schools, residences, retreat centers, and other projects of a single organization: Opus Dei, the "Work of God," a Catholic society founded in 1928 in Spain with the intention of "sanctifying" the secular world.

Opus Dei had controlled the board of Banco Popular for around twenty years. All the services a bank can perform for a valued client were made available to it: currency movements, shell companies, letters of credit, secret bank accounts in Panama, Switzerland, and Liechtenstein. The bank set up a charitable foundation to which it dedicated 5 percent of its profits annually, eventually amounting to $150 million in today''s money. Shareholders were told by the bank's chairman, a member of Opus Dei, that the money was going to "good causes." Most of the money went to one or another Opus Dei project.

Sometimes red lines were crossed. A sub rosa takeover of a private Swiss bank called Imefbank was followed, throughout the sixties, by large-scale efforts to circumvent Spain's currency controls. Many millions of dollars wound up in Opus Dei's accounts (i.e., its shell companies' accounts) in the course of the huge Matesa manufacturing scandal of 1969, which Gore says was covered up by an Opus Dei member in Franco's cabinet.  A tax-evading businessman and Opus Dei member with a large holding company gave the organization $200 million over the years. This steady stream of unsanctified cash--along with 100 percent of its celibate members' earnings and around 10 percent of its married members' earnings, along with the donations they have incessantly drummed up from benefactors--have gone to finance the organization's ceaseless expansion. It now operates 275 elementary and high schools, 228 university residencies, 160 technical and hospitality schools, 19 universities, 12 business schools,and many retreat facilities and conference centers in 6 continents and 66 countries. In recent years it has funded several conservative academic programs and institutes, like the Witherspoon Institute and the James Madison Program, both in Princeton.  Its net worth[8]  was estimated at $2.8 billion in 2005.

Gore's expert use of tax filings and stock transfers is what one would expect from a veteran financial journalist. How he got so many highly placed Opus Dei members on so many continents to speak with him on the record is more surprising. It is a pity he never got to speak with the founder of Opus Dei, Saint Josemaríia Escriváa de Balaguer[9] , who died in 1975. The saint reportedly had an explosive temper and hated to be contradicted. The confrontation would have been epic. One obvious question would be: Hhow did he reconcile his professedly complete and total trust in God and the power of prayer with his continual browbeating of his "sons" and "daughters" for more money and more recruits? Gore quotes one of his letters: "We must make our Father-God dizzy with our pleading." This is an unflattering conception of God. Was He likely to forget their need? Did He want to be cajoled, like King Lear? Jesus said: "And when you pray, do not keep babbling like the pagans, for they think they will be heard because of their many words. Do not be like them, for your Father knows what you need before you ask Him." (Matthew 6:7-8) Did this not apply to Opus Dei?

Opus Dei does not endorse candidates for political office. Their interventions are limited to spiritual direction, conferring awards, generating publicity, fundraising, and networking. It does not take positions, but it lobbies very hard to place members in policy-making position, especially in the Vatican. Here in the United States, the head of the Conference of Catholic Bishops is a member of Opus Dei, and this has predictably meant a shift in anti-abortion militancy and a decline in concern about poverty. For all their studied public neutrality, there is no doubt where their sympathies lie, and I'm not sure Jesus would approve.

In the Gospel of Matthew, chapter 25twenty-five, Jesus imagines addressing his disciples at the Last Judgment, separating those who have fed the hungry, tended the sick, and otherwise served the poor and powerless from those who have not. He sends the former to heaven and the latter to hell. If this is indeed the real Jesus, then Opus Dei may be in for a shock at the Last Judgment. The only public issues the organization cares about are abortion, gay marriage, pornography, and stem cell research, none of which Jesus said a word about.  That its political allies are enemies of democracy and friends of plutocracy bothers the organization's members not at all. One of their closest collaborators is Leonard Leo, former vice president of the Federalist Society, who dreamed up the idea of stealing a Supreme Court seat from the Democrats and sold it  to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, who thereupon refused to schedule a vote on Obama's nominee for ten months until the nomination lapsed at the end of the congressional session and Trump took office. (McConnell later rushed through the appointment of Amy Coney Barrett eight days before Biden's election.) Antonin Scalia, also close to Opus Dei, helped concoct a flimsy pretext for awarding George W. Bush the presidency in 2000 and all but gloated about it afterward. Clarence Thomas, another friend of the society, is possibly the most corrupt Supreme Court Justice in history, having lied in his confirmation hearings about harassing a female employee and, more recently, accepted millions of dollars in gifts from a right-wing billionaire without reporting them. Former Attorney General William Barr, once a member of the board of Opus Dei's flagship Catholic Information Center in Washington, D.C., was a purveyor of misinformation: according to a federal judge, Barr made "misleading statements" in a "calculated attempt" to misrepresent the Mueller Report in order to cover his boss's (i.e., President Trump's) ass. Why Opus Dei could not refrain from sucking up to wealthy and powerful people with abysmal political morals is something I imagine Jesus will want to know on that Last Day. He may let them off because of all the Masses they've attended, all the Rosaries they've prayed. But I don't think they'll have much to show for themselves in the way of good works. All those universities, business schools, high schools, and so on are primarily recruiting schemes. The love of thought or beauty for their own sake is not, as far as I can tell, any part of their motivation.

Opus Dei is hypersensitive to bad publicity. With one exception (which Gore covers at length), it has avoided major sex scandals.  But it has taken three hits in recent years: the financial scandals mentioned above; recruiting underage (i.e., fourteen- or fifteen-year old) adolescents, which many parents understandably view as too young to sign up for a lifetime of sacrifice; and several lawsuits by the Work's "numerary assistants." These are generally young, poor, and uneducated women in underdeveloped countries who are recruited to serve God by maintaining the houses and buildings of Opus Dei. They are trained in domestic arts, given housing and spiritual direction, and in return work up to twelve hours a day cooking, cleaning, doing laundry, and other chores. They are not paid, and they have no retirement accounts or labor contracts. They take vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience, so even if they had any money and could speak the language of the country they're working in (they often can't), it would be a hard life. Those who try to leave and ask for help with the transition are told that they have not actually been working for Opus Dei but for one of the countless anonymous entities set up to own its individual buildings, which has no further responsibility for them.[14]  Lately some of the women have been fighting in court and in the media for restitution. Opus Dei has been resisting. If the judges in these cases could see some of the breathtakingly expensive furnishings at the organization's headquarters in Rome, they might be moved.

The Opus Dei of Gore's portrait puts one in mind of a Leninist revolutionary party: hierarchical, centralized, secretive, calculating, tightly coordinated, demanding total commitment of its members, willing to dispense with ordinary human affection, candor, and compassion in order to achieve the institution's goals. That may sound overstated, but it's not. As an undergraduate, I was a numerary (i.e., celibate) member of Opus Dei for four and a half years: always on the ground floor, so never in a position to observe financial shenanigans or labor-code violations. But Gore's account rings true to me. The pressure to recruit new members was unremitting. The esprit de corps, the sense of being an elite among the elite, was intoxicating. Disobedience was unthinkable. Relationships were entirely instrumental. Spontaneous affection played no part--I gave up my two best friends in college because they were not potential recruits. We still had to consult the Index of Forbidden Books: I gave up two courses because they weren't "safe." Today the policy on reading books, especially books of philosophy, social theory and criticism, or intellectual history,  is even more restrictive. (The self-flagellation was not, however, a big deal.)

What is perhaps hardest to understand from outside the walls is the self-deception. We really believed the transparent falsehoods we continually parroted: falsehoods (or half-truths) about Opus Dei's strict political neutrality and its entire political independence from the Franco regime, about how every member is as free as any other Christian, about how their front organizations are completely autonomous and not controlled by the Prelature in any way, about how Opus Dei bears no resemblance to a religious order and only malice could lead anyone to suggest that it does. Opus Dei: An Open Book is the title of a propaganda tract by a member, as well as the message its spokesmen continually convey. Given how impenetrable is the secrecy enshrouding the organization, and how endless and intricate their conniving, one can only admire their chutzpah.

I wish I could claim to have left in a fit of indignation over Opus Dei's moral failings. Faint-hearted as I was, I would probably have put up with them indefinitely, if I could only have kept believing in Catholicism. And I think I might have kept believing in Catholicism, however implausible, if it didn't demand--of me and, in my fevered undergraduate imagination, of everyone, everywhere, forever, at least in principle--the sacrificium intellectus, a willingness to stop thinking if thinking placed you in danger of losing your soul.  If it were just my own intellect, I think I would have sacrificed it. But it felt, however absurdly, as though I were deciding for all of humanity. In the end, I couldn't give everyone's intellectual freedom away.

"Be ye as cunning as serpents and as guileless as doves," Jesus admonished his disciples. (Matthew 10:16)  No one who has ever encountered Opus Dei would deny that they are as cunning as serpents. But no one who reads Gareth Gore's Opus can possibly believe that they're as guileless as doves.

Free and Equal: A Manifesto for a Just Society by Daniel Chandler. Knopf, 414 pp., $32.00.

"All men are brothers." (Women too, of course.) If asked to agree or disagree with this statement, taken in a normative sense, most people would agree. At the moment Ukrainians might make an exception for Russians, and Israelis and Palestinians for one another - though even they, if they listened to the better angels of their nature, might come around.

Why quote this old saw here? Because I have long felt that these four words are a complete and adequate political philosophy. A brother or sister shares half of one's genes and usually a good many of one's early formative experiences. It's a tie that binds. Of course most people are not literally our brothers or sisters; but the point of that archaic-sounding phrase, "the brotherhood of man," is to jog our moral imaginations, to remind us that even if we don't share genes with most humans, we share with all of them something even more important, which binds us to them even more strongly: a capacity for suffering. Remembering that makes it harder to be indifferent or cruel.

The most influential move in modern political philosophy is just such an appeal to our imaginations. In A Theory of Justice (1971), John Rawls, having defined fairness as the chief virtue of liberal societies, asks how we might all agree on what's fair. He answers that, when deciding on the society's basic rules, we should imagine ourselves all in exactly the same position: not, in this case, sharing genes or memories or capacities, but rather sharing a kind of pristine ignorance. He calls it the "original position." Its moral force comes from our equality of situation: none of us knows anything about him- or herself, and therefore none of us has any special interest in pushing any particular rule or policy. The situation forces us to choose the good of others as well as our own: the only rules that we would have any reason to agree to are those that everybody else would also agree to, since they too are behind the same veil of ignorance as ourselves. It may sound simple, but it's not easy to imagine oneself without any individual characteristics: interests, appetites, hopes, or fears. Just as hard, perhaps, as seeing unlovable strangers as brothers.

A Theory of Justice took the world of academic political philosophy by storm. And yet, the years since its appearance have seen the triumph of paleoconservatism, neoconservatism, and far-right populism. Evidently the rest of the world has not been paying sufficient attention to political philosophers. Fortunately, the latter have not been discouraged. Books explaining or vindicating liberalism have poured forth in a steady stream over these decades, rebuking recalcitrant reality. Two new Rawls-based entries, one concerned mainly with moral psychology, the other with social and economic policy, both lively and persuasive, may not completely vanquish the conservative juggernaut but ought to to slow it down a bit.

Alexandre Lefebvre in Liberalism as a Way of Life cleverly adapts Kierkegaard's complaint that the 19^th century was not living genuine Christianity but rather a stuffy, spiritless simulacrum he called Christendom. According to Lefebvre, the right name for our 21^st-century way of life is not liberalism but liberaldom. Liberaldom is liberalism corrupted by illiberalism, a "craven capitulation to unliberal values": inequality, meritocracy, consumerism, national chauvinism, religious bigotry, the residues of racial and sexual discrimination.

To help denizens of liberaldom overcome the "self-satisfaction and sanctimony" to which we are prone, Lefebvre offers a series of Spiritual Exercises - "practices an individual undertakes to bring about a comprehensive change in their way of living" - to help morally serious liberals cultivate the liberal virtues: impartiality, integrity, intellectual coherence, detachment, generosity, and numerous others. (Lefebvre's vivid, sometimes lyrical descriptions of these virtues, usually pegged to one or another luminous passage from Rawls, are the best part of the book.) The exercises, inspired both by "reflective equilibrium," Rawls's prescribed method for achieving moral clarity, and by the classical philosopher Pierre Hadot, include meditation, observation, examination of conscience, reframing one's perspective, mastering one's passions, and more. They are not quite as subtle or rigorous as Buddhist spiritual exercises, but then Buddhism has had a 2500-year head start.

If Liberalism As a Way of Life aims to edify, Free and Equal by Daniel Chandler aims to clarify. It begins with an excellent 100-page precis of Rawls's theory of "justice as fairness." Recall that Rawls proposed a method for fairly choosing a society's basic structure: we are to imagine ourselves into anonymity, without any but the most generic, universal purposes, powers, and predilections, and then ask what sort of world such a creature would choose. Rawls thought he had a good idea, in the shape of two fundamental rules. First, everyone should have the same basic freedoms: religion, speech, assembly, travel, choice of work, choice of spouse, and so on, which may not be infringed except to prevent infringement of someone else's freedoms. Second, inequalities are justified only to the extent they contribute to improving the lot of the society's worst off.

The second rule, known as the "difference principle," is, along with the original position and the veil of ignorance, one of Rawls's two great original contributions to political philosophy. It is meant to cut the Gordian knot of inequality and incentives. In a morally stunted neoliberal society (ie, ours), people are assumed to work hard or innovate or otherwise do socially useful things only for the sake of money or power. Rawls, taking the world as he finds it, does not appeal to idealism but rather to our choice of the difference principle in the original position. For Rawls, as for Deng Xiaoping, to get rich is glorious, but only as long as your doing so makes the worst off in your society better off. He is similarly permissive about markets: they have their virtues (except where they fail consistently, as in health care, the environment, and other public goods), which should be balanced against everyone's basic right to a living wage and some degree of self-management at work. If this, or several other Rawlsian prescriptions, sounds utopian, Chandler offers plenty of evidence that other rich democracies manage it quite well without bankrupting themselves or even falling behind the US in any important respects.

Gratifyingly, evidence abounds in Free and Equal. For a philosopher, Chandler has read a remarkable amount of social science, and his footnotes teem, not only with citations but also with supplementary discussions of the policy proposals in the main text. All his suggestions -- about tax policy, environmental policy, health care, education, immigration, race, workplace democracy - are sensible, and some of them are bold. Random selection of officeholders has been discussed in recent decades, but without much elaboration; Chandler fleshes it out, arguing that it can supplement, if not yet substitute for, elections. American campaign finance probably can't be fixed unless the conservative justices of the Supreme Court have a road-to-Damascus revelation; but if they do, the "democracy vouchers" Chandler describes - $100, say, to every voter, to give to a party or candidate of her choice - might well be the best way to pay for the electoral circus. And his cautious but enthusiastic endorsement of a Universal Basic Income demonstrates (once again) that it's a serious proposal, worthy of consideration in a humane, enlightened - free and equal - polity.

Why do these two excellent books yield me, at least, so little hope? Perhaps because neither author betrays much awareness of the extraordinary obstacles in the way of a just society. Like other forms of self-cultivation - Buddhist meditation, Christian asceticism, Stoic virtue, yoga - Lefebvre's spiritual exercises can produce supremely valuable results; likewise Chandler's Rawlsian reflections. But I doubt either can produce profound political change.

America is a plutocracy. That does not mean only that wealth is wildly unevenly distributed. It means also that nearly every major institution or process in our society is, if not directly for sale, then subject to financial constraints that make the influence of rich individuals and corporations difficult, and often impossible, to resist. Politicians at every level, who must begin immediately on taking office to devote roughly half of their time to fundraising for the next campaign; university presidents and deans browbeaten by billionaires; public television executives desperate to sell prestige for pennies; federal regulators who hope to exchange their meager salaries for more generous ones from some company their agency now regulates; newspaper editors badgered by their publishers because some corporation has threatened to sue, even with no hope of winning, in the knowledge that the newspaper cannot afford a suit; gigantic asset-management funds that now control an astounding 40 percent of the world's wealth, including an increasing share of the physical and social infrastructure on which modern life depends;[1] predatory private equity funds, which use tailor-made tax laws to profitably destroy functioning companies, including hospitals and nursing homes, at great cost to employees, customers, and patients - these are just a few of the pressure points. The methods of social control through financial power in America are exceedingly numerous and intricate. The result is that very little gets done that the plutocracy - big business and the very rich - do not want done.

Neither liberal virtue nor reflective equilibrium will change this. The reason is not that a society of virtuous and fair-minded people would have no effect on the despotism of money; of course it would. The reason is that as soon as the spread of virtue and a spirit of fairness among the citizenry threatens to fundamentally restructure social relations, the plutocracy will find a way to outlaw them, or to give them a bad name. That is not a joke or a conspiracy theory. They've done it before. Early in the 20^th century, battered by two decades of Populist and socialist agitation, and perhaps also concerned about the effect of the papal social encyclicals on the large number of Catholic immigrants, the business class launched an intensive campaign to indoctrinate the population in the blessings of "economic freedom" and unfettered competition and the dangers of foolish talk about solidarity and cooperation. The new ideology, market fundamentalism, sought to protect business from even minimal government interference, as well as from labor unions, which were held to be a violation of workers' rights and contrary to their best interests. This view was promoted through books, pamphlets, magazines, advertising campaigns, lectures, documentary films, radio and television, research institutes, academic programs and appointments, and of course, ceaseless Congressional lobbying. Naturally these activities were expensive, but they were amply financed by the National Association of Manufacturers, the Foundation for Economic Education, the American Liberty League, the National Electric Light Association, and many other industry groups, right-wing foundations, and wealthy individuals and families. All through the New Deal and the Great Society, they never let up, and their efforts were finally crowned with success by the election in 1980 of the Great Oversimplifier, Ronald Reagan, at which point they began to sabotage the New Deal's legacy in earnest. Today, in full control of one of our two national parties, most state governments, and the Supreme Court, this wrecking crew is still hard at work.

Trying to understand the plight of contemporary liberalism without reference to this decades-long - and ongoing - business-sponsored propaganda blitz (described in great detail in Naomi Oreskes and Eric Conway's important book, The Big Myth:       How American Business Taught Us to Loathe Government and Love the Free Market (2023)) would be like trying to understand the decline of literacy without reference to advertising or television. And hoping to reverse it without sustained, well-resourced, society-wide cooperation by a large and determined anti-plutocratic majority is a pipedream. For the struggle ahead - if there is one; currently around half of American voters seem eager to be governed by an authoritarian plutocrat, who has promised to make short work of liberal virtues and ideals - we will need, even more than spiritual discernment or philosophical clarity, inexhaustible indignation, wide-ranging solidarity, and dogged perseverance.

                                        [END]

George Scialabba's most recent book is Only a Voice: Essays.

Determined: A Science of Life Without Free Will by Robert M. Sapolsky. Penguin Press, 511 pages, $35.00.

Free Agents: How Evolution Gave Us Free Will by Kevin J. Mitchell. Princeton University Press, 333 pages, $29.95.

In 1884 William James began his celebrated essay "The Dilemma of Determinism" by begging his readers' indulgence: "A common opinion prevails that the juice has ages ago been pressed out of the free-will controversy, and that no new champion can do more than warm up stale arguments which everyone has heard." James persisted and rendered the subject very juicy, as he always did. But if the topic appeared exhausted to most people then, surely a hundred and forty years later there can't be anything new to say? Whole new fields of physics, biology, mathematics, and medicine have been invented - surely this ancient philosophical question doesn't still interest anyone?

Indeed it does; it retains for many what James called "the most momentous importance." Like other hardy perennials - the objectivity of "good"; the universality of truth; the existence of human nature and its telos - it continues to fascinate philosophers and laypersons, who agree only that the stakes are enormous: "our very humanity," many of them insist.

Why so momentous? Skepticism about free will is said to produce two disastrous but opposed states of mind. The first is apathy: we are bound to be so demoralized by the conviction that nothing is up to us, that we are not the captains of our fate, that we will no longer get out of bed. The other is frenzy: we will be so exhilarated by our liberation from responsibility and guilt that we will run amok, like Dostoevsky's imagined atheist, who concludes that if God does not exist, everything is permitted.

Note that it is not the absence of free will but only the absence of belief in free will that is said to have these baneful effects. People who never give the subject a thought are neither apathetic nor frenetic, at least not for these reasons. Perhaps we should just stop thinking about the whole question?

For 2500 years no generation has succeeded in doing that, so we may as well wade in. What is free will? It is the capacity to make uncaused choices. This does not mean that nothing causes my choice; it means that I do. But surely something has caused me to be the person who makes that choice? And doesn't whatever causes me to be the person I am cause the choices I make?

In Determined: A Science of Life Without Free Will, Robert Sapolsky answers "Yes" in staggering detail. Sapolsky, a neuroscientist at Stanford, sees every human life as a seamless web of causation.

[T]he intent you form, the person you are, is the result of all the interactions between biology and environment that came before. .... Each prior influence flows without a break from the effects of the influences before. There's no point in the sequence where you can insert a freedom of will that will be in the biological world but not of it.

"No point in the sequence" - to clinch this claim, Sapolsky provides a guided tour of the brain and nervous system in action: neurons and synapses, neurotransmitters and receptors, hormones and proteins, genetics and epigenetics, prefrontal cortex and amygdala, along with forays downward into quantum indeterminacy and upward into anthropology, law, evolutionary psychology, social psychology, and the history of medicine. Whether or not you're persuaded by Determined, it's a marvelously rich book.

And so is, in a very different way, Free Agents: How Evolution Gave Us Free Will by Kevin Mitchell, a neuroscientist at Trinity College, Dublin. While Sapolsky supplies dozens of discrete mini-lectures about how various substances, structures, systems, and social practices affect behavior and, in particular, decisions, Mitchell's book tells a single overarching story of how human moral personality evolved: from the molecular origins of organic evolution through unicellular and multicellular creatures, worms, primitive vertebrates, lower mammals, primates, and us; first developing capacities to construct boundaries, self-regulate, and process information, then capacities to formulate goals, integrate information, and internalize meaning, until finally the faculty of free will evolves in humans:

an open-ended ability for individuals to learn to create new goals further removed from the ultimate imperatives of survival, to plan over longer timeframes, to simulate the outcomes of possible actions and internally evaluate them before acting, to decouple cognition from action, and ultimately to inspect their own reasons and subject them to metacognitive scrutiny.

It is a masterly exposition, however far along the path to free will one follows

him.

The disagreement between Sapolsky and Mitchell can be put succinctly. Mitchell shows how our reasoning power evolved over billions of years, through a sequence that was wholly accidental but profoundly logical, and that acting for reasons is our defining property and another name for free will. Sapolsky's rejoinder is simple: where do reasons come from? They come, he answers, from milliseconds before our choice, and also from seconds, minutes, hours, days, years, and decades before; from adolescence, childhood, and fetal life; from our genome, our ancestral culture, and our species history. At every point, experiences lay down traces in our brain that affect our present choices, and in measurable fashion - Sapolsky cites a tremendous array of studies from the behavioral sciences over the last several decades. It's a rare intellectual confrontation: both sides deeply informed, fair-minded, incisively argued. My intuitions are with Sapolsky, but Mitchell makes a stronger case for free will than I would have thought possible.

Are we free, then? What hinges on this decision? Does the absence of free will imply passivity and paralysis? Once afflicted with the fatal skepticism, do we simply idle until the universe decides to set us in motion? And is everything we do thereafter predetermined - out of our hands, so that we are mere spectators of all our actions?

Hardly. Consider a historical example: Marx's widely ridiculed prediction of the inevitability of socialism. Innumerable people have assumed he meant that socialism would arrive whether or not anyone ever lifted a finger to bring it about, so that we all might as well go fishing. But in fact, Marx thought several very specific things - the business cycle and its hardships; the culture of the factory, which brought worker together as never before; and universal education - would induce people to overthrow the existing social order and establish a more cooperative one. And he was right: workers in England, France, Germany, and the United States tried unsuccessfully to overthrow capitalism in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries. The capitalists fought back successfully, but also grudgingly conceded a welfare state to blunt the impact of future crises. Where in all this drama is there any contradiction between inevitability and free choice? The workers chose freely to rebel, for reasons that compelled them. The capitalists reacted, for their own compelling reasons. Both acted as freely as anyone could and as inevitably as everyone must.

Well, then, will we run amok? Why would we? We will have exactly the same reasons for running amok whether or not we believe in free will, and exactly the same resources for resisting the temptation, if we are tempted. The contrary view - that every violent or voluptuous impulse will have its way with us - assumes that not having free will is equivalent to having no will at all; that because choices are caused, there are no choices.

Obviously, every person alive makes many choices every day. Some are wholly predictable; some are explicable after the fact; some, following on internal conflict, are murkier. All are caused by the mechanisms and processes Sapolsky describes in great detail, yet most of them are free, in the only sense that matters.

What is that sense? It is, simply, the absence of coercion. Even if all choices are caused, only some are coerced. Law, politics, and moral psychology have evolved an indispensable distinction between free and coerced. If a choleric temperament, a secularist education, and a bout of indigestion cause someone to throw a brick through a church window, we say he acted freely - i.e., without coercion. If he does so with a gun to his head, or in the throes of a schizophrenic episode, then he acted under coercion - i.e., not freely. Both acts were wholly caused; free will is nowhere in the picture. But only one of them carries moral and legal responsibility.

But why should it? If there is no free will and the disgruntled secularist's action was entirely caused, how can we hold him responsible? We do it to make a common life possible. Drawing a line between free and coerced, responsible and excusable, is something every society does, and must do. Different epochs - and even societies within the same epoch - do it differently, depending on each society's scientific knowledge and moral sensibility. These differences are inevitable: because there is no immutable human nature, there is no escape from contingency.

Free-will skeptics and free-will believers meet, like Hector and Achilles, on the Plain of Punishment. Free will implies blame; blame licenses punishment; and a license to punish brings out the worst in human beings, Sapolsky claims. It is barbarous to punish someone for a deed he couldn't help doing, and since that is true of all deeds, no punishment is fair. Mitchell agrees that without free will "how can we be worthy of praise or blame? How can we defend judgment or punishment?" But we do have free will, he thinks, so praise and blame, judgment and punishment are legitimate in principle.

Mitchell asks that we judge his case for free will without regard to the consequences of belief or skepticism, even though the consequence of skepticism, in his view, is that our moral and political worlds would crumble. Sapolsky devises a substitute for punishment that actually looks quite a bit like punishment: i.e., quarantine. If a judge and jury believe that an offender is likely to repeat, they may prevent it by quarantining (otherwise known as imprisoning) him. But this is no more punitive than taking a car with faulty steering off the road; and moreover, the offender is entitled to humane treatment and realistic job training, which produce, in Scandinavia, recidivism rates fully two-thirds lower than our brutal American corrections regime.

But are beliefs about free will really in point here? Judges, whether or not they believe in free will, should take more cognizance of mitigating circumstances than they do now. A crack baby who grows up to be an addict and petty thief deserves mercy; a billionaire whose tax evasion robs his fellow citizens of tens of millions of dollars deserves none. But no philosophical convictions are needed to arrive at these conclusions, only humanity and good sense.

And whether or not we have free will, isn't punishment also justified as deterrence? Surely the prospect of a long stretch in prison (or quarantine) would give pause to at least some murderers, rapists, and persons scheming to overturn a fair presidential election? And beyond that, punishment serves as a public affirmation of a family's and society's values. We are embodied beings: values cannot only be preached, they must sometimes be enforced.

At a certain point, one may ask: what is really at stake in this debate? Sapolsky appears to harbor no metaphysical designs on readers; he spins his intricate, ingenious causal webs only, in the end, to enlarge our sympathy for life's failures. Mitchell does seem to have a humanity-affirming philosophical agenda. "You are the type of thing that can take action, that can make decisions, that can be a causal force in the world: you are an agent," he often reminds the reader, implying that these are things a scientific materialist must, in strict logic, deny. But I strongly doubt that any scientific materialist anywhere in the multiverse would deny that she can take action, make decisions, or be a causal force, or that she is an agent, or does things for reasons. She might, though, think that all her choices are caused, which, Sapolsky would say, is perfectly compatible with taking actions, making decisions, being a causal force, or acting for reasons. Elsewhere Mitchell warns readers not to believe anyone (presumably the insidious scientific materialist) who suggests that we are merely "a collection of atoms pushed around by the laws of physics." To which our scientific materialist might reply that we are indeed very highly organized collections of atoms, molecules, nerves, muscles, and hundreds of other components, pushed and pulled by the laws of physics, chemistry, biology, neuroscience, psychology, sociology, economics, and politics, along with intimations from philosophy, history, and art, and constantly adjusting to and modifying those influences from a center that is provisionally but not permanently stable. This, she would say, is how one can be an agent without free will.

With what I hope is due deference, I humbly disagree with both Sapolsky and Mitchell, and even with my deeply revered William James. Perhaps the question of free will is not so momentous. Philosophers have been debating about it for thousands of years, Mitchell observes. "That these debates continue today with unabated fervor tells you that they have not yet resolved the issue." Indeed, they haven't. Perhaps they should take a break. Perhaps it is a controversy without consequences. Perhaps whether we are free or fated, morality and politics, science and medicine, art and literature will all go their merry or melancholy ways, unaffected. Notwithstanding Sapolsky's hopes and Mitchell's fears, whatever we decide about free will, the world - even the moral world - will look the same afterward as before. This, along with our millennia-long failure to make appreciable - or any - progress toward an answer, suggests that we are in the presence of a pseudo-problem. James himself, in "The Will to Believe," written a dozen years after he defended free will in "The Dilemma of Determinism," conceded that "free will and simple wishing do seem, in the matter of our credences, to be only fifth wheels to the coach." The moral and political worlds run - to the extent they run at all - on generosity and imagination, mother wit and sympathetic understanding. These can answer all our questions about moral responsibility and moral obligation without our having to solve the insoluble conundrums of free will.

                           [END]

George Scialabba's most recent book is Only a Voice: Selected Essays.

28 October 2023

On the responsibility of intellectuals

As the conscience of society, writer-thinkers should not be swayed by prevailing political opinion in the Israel-Hamas conflict.

By George Scialabba

Illustration by Jedi Noordegraaf / Ikon Images

I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn,
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return.

--WH Auden, "September 1, 1939"

"The 7 October attack by Hamas was morally barbarous and strategically futile. Nothing justifies the killing of innocents, not even the denial of a people's nationhood for 75 years, the displacement of hundreds of thousands of them to make way for colonial settlers, or the killing of thousands of their own innocents in scandalously disproportionate 'reprisals'. And as for strategy, for the weak (and not only for them), nothing is less efficacious than such violence, which makes trust - the only reliable basis of lasting security - impossible. Better a people should suffer another 75 years of dispossession than that another such crime be committed in its name. Of course, those who would allow this people to go without justice for another 75 years, and who allowed it to go without justice for the last 75 years, share the murderers' guilt, and with far less excuse."

No one asked me for a public statement after the Hamas raid. If anyone had, this is roughly what I would have said, and I've used it as a kind of template in reacting to the innumerable public statements, solicited and unsolicited, that I've encountered since the event.

The loudest class of reactions - the most numerous, most anguished, most indignant - has been to the least consequential of statements: those of university students. Several dozen student organisations, probably representing several hundred individuals, issued a statement after the raid that began by holding Israel "entirely responsible" for "all the unfolding violence". Academic luminaries such as Lawrence Summers, and more consequentially, billionaire donors such as Ken Griffin, Marc Rowan and Jon Huntsman demanded that the universities in question (Harvard and University of Pennsylvania - though Penn was guilty only of hosting a Palestinian literature festival several weeks before the attack) officially disavow the students' statements. There was, of course, little debate about the substance of the letter beyond hand-wringing, and it has now been deleted, with the (desired?) result that there will apparently be little more. Is this how such matters should be handled in a healthy democratic society, or, for that matter, a self-respecting educational institution? Couldn't Summers or some other Harvard eminence responsible for the instruction of the young have descended from Parnassus and shown the deluded students the error of their ways in face-to-face debate?

What did the students mean by their first sentence holding Israel "entirely responsible" for the attack? They could not have meant what the sentence appears to mean: that Israel rather than Hamas carried out the attack. They must have been making a statement about moral responsibility for the attack. To absolve Hamas of responsibility for murder is plainly wrong; therefore "entirely responsible" is indefensible. But what if the students had written "largely responsible"? Suppose that during the Vietnam War the National Liberation Front (NLF), or Viet Cong, had committed some atrocity comparable to Hamas's? I don't know how students then would have reacted, but surely millions of Americans would have agreed that the United States, as the aggressor, was "largely responsible for the unfolding violence", even if NLF atrocities were also morally wrong. Most of the world - though not Americans, by and large - believes that Israel is, in effect, the aggressor in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict: for preventing the return of 750,000 Palestinian refugees to their homes after the 1948 war and ever since; for continually extending its illegal settlements on Palestinian land in the West Bank; for devastating southern Lebanon in 1978 and 1982 in an attempt to destroy the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO); for refusing to accept the results of the 2006 Palestinian election, in which Hamas was chosen as the Palestinians' political representative; and for imposing an inhumane blockade on the two million inhabitants of Gaza, and carrying out vastly disproportionate reprisals, mostly affecting civilians, after previous Hamas attacks. I'm pretty sure the rest of the world, having supported countless UN resolutions demanding that Israel give back the West Bank, would have ignored the students' statement or rebuked them for rhetorical ineptitude but not seen it as an existential threat to Israel or to Jews.

Student-bashing is a species of left-bashing. If war is politics by other means, so are polemics about foreign policy. The right and the centre have shown themselves determined to locate and publicise "irresponsible" formulations by the left. That would be welcome if they also deigned to take notice of the non-foolish things leftists have to say - often in the same piece - about centrists' and rightists' cherished illusions and guilty silences.

In "Notes on Nationalism" (1945), George Orwell observed: "The nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, but he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them." The opinion and commentary I have read so far - in the New York Times, the Washington Post, Foreign Affairs and online sites such as Unherd, Quillette, Compact and Persuasion - has been almost wholly devoid of any mention of Israel's many crimes against the Palestinians, as though that would be to minimise the horror of Hamas's attack or deny Israel's right to lawful self-defence. On the contrary, the usual judgement about comparative criminality is implied, for example, in this entirely typical article from New York Magazine:

"The Israel Defense Forces do not, as a matter of policy, aim to kill Palestinian civilians, though it is debatable how sorry they really are when they inevitably do. This differentiates them from Hamas, which glorifies the killing of innocent Israelis (because again, in their worldview, no Israeli is innocent)."

In the 15 years before the Hamas attack, Palestinians suffered 6,407 fatalities and 152,560 injuries in comparison with Israel's 308 and 6,307, respectively.

Obviously, every event has both immediate and ultimate causes. In the present case, one should ask both who is responsible for the massacre and who is responsible for its context, the conflict that has generated so many past and (probably) future massacres. This is the left-wing reflex, which infuriates left-bashers, who insist that talk of root causes is merely an excuse for "revolutionary" violence. That is an evergreen fallacy: that to explain is to justify. It is doubtless, in some cases, an honest confusion; in others, an ideologically motivated dodge. In the latter case, its purpose is to deny that, beyond simply denouncing terrorism by the designated enemy, anything morally relevant remains to be said.

But some things do remain to be said. First, that by the ordinary definition of terrorism - deliberate violence against civilians for political purposes - both Israel and the United States have also been guilty of terrorism: the former during its 1978 and 1982 invasions of Lebanon, as well as many of its bombing raids in that country at other times, and its blockade and bombing of Gaza; the US far more extensively, through its support, training and arms sales to many brutal regimes and insurgencies; the latter's large-scale bombing of cities in the Second World War, the Korean War and the Indochina War; and the Iraqi sanctions, which killed tens of thousands of civilians. Second, that the definition of terrorism should perhaps be broadened to include reprisals that can hardly fail to produce civilian casualties, like the bombing, strafing and bulldozing of inhabited areas where terrorists may be hiding; or that cause a grave deterioration in the life of an entire society, like large-scale jailings, house detonations, curfews, roadblocks, checkpoints, school closings, border closings, import restrictions, destruction of cultural, administrative and agricultural resources, and more. The third point to raise is that those responsible for a huge, flagrant, persistent injustice, which they could remedy without grave detriment to their own society's security, and which terrorists claim to be protesting, deserve some blame for the terrorists' crimes (an allocation that does not diminish the terrorists' responsibility). The left's critics deplore its lack of moral complexity, but their own understanding of terrorism is a virtual flight from complexity.

[See also: The Cloud of Unreason]

Another simplicity to which Western (particularly American) intellectuals are prone is "rejectionism". According to the conventional wisdom, Israel has made many generous peace offers over the years, which Palestinians have refused, demonstrating their - and other Arabs' - fundamental unwillingness to live peacefully alongside Israel and absolving Israel of its prima facie obligations to somehow make whole the refugees of 1948 and relinquish Palestinian lands annexed since 1967. In the New York Times, under its executive editor AM Rosenthal, and the New Republic under Martin Peretz, probably the two most influential American vehicles of political opinion in the late 20th century, this view was unquestioned.

It was, nonetheless, false. The Egyptian Peace Plan of 1971, the PLO Peace Plan of 1988, and the Arab Peace Plan of 2002 all envisaged full diplomatic recognition of Israel. Israel rejected or ignored all of them. The reason, as with the Madrid, Oslo and Camp David negotiations, is that Israel has never been willing to withdraw from all the occupied territories and allow a Palestinian state there. The history of the Byzantine manoeuvres with which Israeli negotiators managed to portray various schemes for partial withdrawal but continued control as generous peace offers is told in two books by Israeli writers: Israel and Palestine: Reappraisals, Revisions, Refutations (2009) by the Oxford-based historian Avi Shlaim and Israel/Palestine (2002) by the academic Tanya Reinhart, as well as in Noam Chomsky's monumental and indispensable Fateful Triangle (1983).

Many have called the Hamas massacre Israel's 9/11. If so, we must not repeat that event's sequel. The response of American intellectuals to 9/11 was shameful. Only one explanation was allowed: the terrorists hated American values: democracy, progress, science, freedom. The notion that they had grievances, legitimate or fanciful, about American foreign policy was derided as "apologetics for terrorism" or "reflexive anti-Americanism", even though the George W Bush White House's chief counterterrorism expert, Richard Clarke, said the same thing, citing publications by al-Qaeda. Eventually, after a period of national mobilisation aided by these left-bashing intellectuals - Christopher Hitchens, Charles Krauthammer, the drum-beating Project for a New American Century, the New Republic's mean-spirited "Idiocy Watch", which jeered at reservations about the war on terror - America marched off to two ruinous wars, one criminal and one of tenuous legality. Let us hope Israel is wiser and more law-abiding.

Apart from a few student revolutionaries, no one has actually welcomed the Hamas attack and called for more of the same. What, then, should Western intellectuals say to Israelis and Palestinians? We should remind the Palestinians of their own professed belief: "And the retribution for an evil act is an evil one like it, but whoever pardons and makes reconciliation - his reward is [due] from Allah. Indeed, He does not like wrongdoers" (Koran 42:40). I am pretty sure "wrongdoers" includes "terrorists". Islam, Judaism and Christianity all teach that it is better to suffer an evil than to commit one. Beyond that, we should advise them to appeal to the conscience of Israelis - and Americans, who have steadfastly enabled Israeli policy since 1967. Whether or not that advice turns out to be a cruel joke depends at least in part on us intellectuals, whose vocation it is to inform the conscience of our societies.

We should tell the Israelis that they must refuse to pretend they are blameless, whatever their politicians and their foreign cheerleaders tell them; that having suffered even the greatest of evils does not license doing evil in return, much less to those who had not done them evil in the first place; and that they have some substantial injustices to redress, and though doing so will probably not gravely threaten their security, they must do so whether or not - though of course as prudently as possible.

Finally, because power entails responsibility and preponderant power entails preponderant responsibility, Western intellectuals should not fail to address America's leaders and citizens. For the sake of a reliable and powerful ally in the region containing "one of the greatest material prizes in world history", as an American statesman described Middle Eastern oil in the 1940s, and secondly because of a ferocious domestic lobby, the US has virtually conceded Israel carte blanche in its dealings with the Palestinians. The policy has been a success in its own terms: no serious threat to American dominance in the region has arisen in many decades. But it is realpolitik at its ugliest. The US cannot dictate peace, of course, but its influence is immense: Israel has no other source of military and diplomatic support.

Unfortunately, no one in American politics now has the moral or intellectual stature to propose a just settlement. Israel's current political leadership is the most fanatical and bloody-minded in that country's history. And Palestinian politics have never recovered from the Israeli-American overturning of their election in 2006. In Israel/Palestine, it is midnight in the century.

George Scialabba's Only a Voice: Essays has just been published by Verso.

The Cold War has a lot to answer for: trillions of dollars of wasteful military spending; a couple of nuclear close shaves, either of which might easily have led to a nuclear exchange, with unimaginable consequences; and during the late Forties and early Fifties, thousands of American lives ruined or marred by Congressional witch hunts and an unchecked FBI. It also, according to Samuel Moyn's original and penetrating new book, swallowed up our political imagination.

In the last few decades, liberalism has undergone a bewildering succession of attacks, vindications, anatomies, autopsies, and resurrections. It has been denounced as the upholder of the unholy capitalist political order and as the destroyer of the sacred Christian moral order. Evidently liberalism is for Americans - to adapt Madeline Albright's unfortunate phrase - the indispensable ideology.

"Liberalism" is a protean word, and any historical account of it will be open to one or another objection. But Moyn is something of an expert at intellectual genealogy. Not Enough: Human Rights in an Unequal World (2018) followed that (also protean) idea throughout the 20^th century, as it developed in a subtle counterpoint with demands for economic equality, their proponents often competing within international institutions, foundations, and academia for funding, endorsements, and staff. Humane: How the United States Abandoned Peace and Reinvented War (2021) had a similarly dialectical structure, tracing over a century and a half how the ideal of humanitarian war gradually displaced the movement - once very strong - to outlaw all wars. The US in particular, Moyn showed, has in recent decades gone all in on humanitarian war while firmly disavowing any constraint on its sovereign right to wage war whenever and wherever it sees fit, leaving us engaged in "deterritorialized and endless wars," carried on with ultra-precise weapons.

Liberalism Against Itself describes liberalism's decline from the expansive and optimistic creed birthed by the Enlightenment and Romanticism to a cramped and defensive mindset that saw dangers and enemies everywhere. The Cold War liberals were traumatized by Nazism and Stalinism, to the point that most of the vocabulary of political hope - "liberation," "revolution," "emancipation," "utopia" - became unavailable. And they went even further: highly accomplished scholars (those that Moyn discusses, at any rate), they hunted down the ideas they believed to be the roots of the 20^th-century catastrophe.

The troop Moyn has chosen to study is an illustrious one. They are six in all: three intellectual celebrities - Hannah Arendt, Isaiah Berlin, and Karl Popper; two others only slightly less well-known: Gertrude Himmelfarb, a prolific historian, and Judith Shklar, a political theorist; and a surprising and adventurous choice, Lionel Trilling. (He leaves out popular but all-too-familiar figures like Reinhold Niebuhr and Walter Lippmann.) There were differences among them, but they all agreed that the rationalism of the 18^th-century Enlightenment bred a fateful overconfidence with terrible consequences, first in the French Revolution and then in the Communist movements of the 19^th and 20^th centuries. The Cold War liberals also reinterpreted Romanticism as an episode in the history of political thought, not as an inspiration for creative agency and the higher life, as earlier liberals like Tocqueville and Benjamin Constant had conceived it, but as a scapegoat and a caution. Prometheanism, they believed, was an ever-present temptation.

Rousseau and Hegel figured prominently in what Moyn calls the Cold War liberals' "anti-canon." Rousseau, by speaking of different wills and different liberties, had, according to Isaiah Berlin, introduced into the world the "grotesque paradox whereby a man is told that to be deprived of his liberty is to be given a higher, nobler liberty" - a familiar Communist gambit. Rousseau also exalted feeling and imagination to parity with reason - in effect, according to the Cold War liberals, preaching irrationalism. Hegel's many offenses included believing that history was a progress, arguing that the state was an important agency of human betterment, and not being a commonsensical English empiricist. Rousseau and Hegel, together with the 18^th-century philosophes and Marx, epitomized the pernicious doctrines that had led the modern world astray: progressivism and perfectionism.

The concept of progress was undoubtedly the largest source of the Cold War liberals' grievance. Of course even conservatives acknowledge progress: in science, technology, medicine. It is claims about moral or political progress that make them see red, and especially claims about inevitable progress, which allow rulers to rationalize oppression and deprivation. But such claims are not so common as the emphatic warnings from Cold War liberals might suggest. Condorcet thought that universal brotherhood would eventually reign. Hegel thought that Reason would eventually reign. Marx thought that workers would eventually reign. Each of them had a theory about how his predictions might come true. But they were not dogmatic inevitabilists like, say, St. Simon, Comte, and Herbert Spencer. The others, though condemned as proto-totalitarians by the Cold War liberals, were not saying much more than MLK's "the arc of the universe bends toward justice." But as with many ideas and terms appropriated by the Bolsheviks, "progress" became deeply and enduringly suspect.

"Perfectionism" grew out of Romanticism, with its emphasis on the uniqueness and creative power of individuals. Liberalism before the World Wars, Moyn writes, was "the project of securing the conditions - including the economic conditions - for the enjoyment of creative freedom" - by everyone. After the First World War, this emancipatory project, like most projects, seemed beside the point. After the Second, it seemed positively dangerous - a program waiting for a demagogue to take it up. The Cold War liberals preached the opposite doctrine - Original Sin - with a vengeance. A little like Dostoevsky's Grand Inquisitor, they thought that ordinary people could not bear much reality or happiness and needed firm, vigilant political guidance. They also recommended religion to the public, though none of them was religious.

Moyn's graduate school mentor Judith Shklar is the book's muse. It was she who held out longest against the Cold War liberals' cardinal mistake: the wholesale rejection of the Enlightenment. She also criticized one of the most unfortunate aspects of Cold War liberalism: its near-exclusive preference for negative liberty.

Shklar's friend Isaiah Berlin was, like her, friendlier to the Enlightenment and Romanticism than most Cold War liberals. But his very influential foray into political theory, Two Concepts of Liberty, enshrined a distinction between negative liberty - freedom from - and positive liberty - freedom to. In Shklar's view, this maimed traditional liberalism, which had cared as much about "moral and intellectual self-fulfillment" as about "absence of restraint."

Gertrude Himmelfarb found in English intellectual history, and particularly in the rediscovery of one of its great figures, Lord Acton, an antidote for the French and German toxins that had infected modern political theory. Acton was a historian of freedom, a champion of absolute, unconditional moral law, and a bulwark against progressivism ('progress is the religion of those who have none," he pronounced) and relativism.

Hannah Arendt was, Moyn writes, a "fellow traveler" of the Cold War liberals. From different philosophical premises, she arrived at similarly pessimistic conclusions. The Roman Republic was Arendt's ideal, and nothing in modern times equaled its balance of order and freedom except the American colonial period. She despised Rousseau and Hegel, the French and Russian Revolutions, as cordially as the Cold War liberals did. She also shared their distaste for the postcolonial states, many of which appropriated Western rhetoric about revolution and liberation to cover up tyranny and corruption. Arendt's and the Cold Warriors' caustic skepticism about the possibility of non-Western freedom was partly hard-eyed realism and partly, Moyn suggests, racism.

Lionel Trilling is an unexpected presence in this book, and an illuminating one. Trilling was essential in introducing American Cold War liberals to Freud - not the critic of sexual repression but the stern moralist, preaching renunciation and self-control. "The Cold War liberals," Moyn writes, "canonized Freud for the self-oppression he recommended: strict self-control for the sake of avoiding misdirected enthusiasm and monitoring disorderly passion." This self-control - he often called it "responsibility" - was Trilling's lifelong teaching. For him as for the Cold War liberals, enthusiasm and passion were guilty until proven innocent.

                                    **********

If there was one word that Cold War liberals almost invariably used to characterize their outlook, it was "tragic." That Reason, the purported agent of human liberation, had instead spawned concentration camps; that the United States, with the noblest of intentions, wound up again and again allied with unsavory right-wing dictatorships; that this peace-loving nation should find itself forced to drop so many and such lethal bombs on so many noncombatants throughout the 20^th century - bombing them into "a nobler, higher liberty," as Isaiah Berlin might have said (but didn't): these regrettable facts fell into the category of "tragic irony." Those who could not perceive the tragedy - or misidentified the victims - were derided as naïve or doctrinaire, too impatient to appreciate the subtle ironies that would preclude an unequivocal condemnation of American foreign policy.

"Tragic irony" was not entirely a dodge. It was meant to counter a style of thinking that one might call Jacobin: a tendency to think about politics schematically, with too much reliance on abstractions and too much readiness to assign people to categories (like class), which thereafter determine their treatment, and too little allowance for contingency and individuality. There was also a tendency in this style of thought to appeal to historically inevitability, usually to justify sacrifices by the masses. The Bolsheviks had done these things to a fault - a monstrous fault - and the Cold War liberals' revulsion was justified. Not justified, however, was their implacable condemnation of any and all radical criticism or action.

                                    ************

Moyn's critique of the Cold War liberals is acute and judicious. But they seem to me liable to another, even more damaging critique: the Cold War liberals simply had no idea what the Cold War was about. They believed it was a mortal combat between democracy and totalitarianism, between freedom and slavery, and most elementally, between good and evil. But it was nothing of the sort.

The actual Cold War, rather than the grand clash of metaphysical systems imagined by the Cold War liberals, was a tacit, mutually advantageous arrangement between the superpowers to represent each other as a supreme threat, a tireless aggressor, an evil empire, in order to induce their own populations to bear the moral and material costs of imposing their different forms of hegemony in their respective domains. US support for numerous repressive and violent regimes engaged in crushing restive populations could hardly be justified to the American public honestly, i.e., as support for a favorable investment climate. So Americans were instructed that the international Communist crusade was threatening yet another helpless country vital to the defense of the Free World - no matter what that country's population might want. The Soviets, likewise, portrayed their interventions in Eastern Europe as the defense of socialism against cunning and unscrupulous agents of capitalist counterrevolution, when what was really at stake was, in the first place, to prevent the Russian population from becoming infected with democratic ideas from the satellite countries, and in the second place, to secure a buffer against invasion from the West, which had nearly destroyed Russia three times in a century and a half. (Then as now, NATO made the Russians extremely nervous.)

The Cold War liberals were useful idiots. "Useful idiot" is a term of art. Of course the Cold War liberals were not idiots, any more than Brecht, Sartre, and Lukacs were idiots. But just as Brecht, Sartre, and Lukacs managed not to notice the tyranny and mendacity of the Soviet Union in order to remain useful to the international proletarian revolution, the Cold War liberals managed not to notice the United States' consistent support of brutal and undemocratic but business-friendly Third World regimes. The roster of those regimes is very long - Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Congo, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Greece, Guatemala, Honduras, Indonesia, Iran, Iraq, Nicaragua, the Philippines, Uruguay - and the toll of suffering on the subject populations very great. History will judge both groups of useful idiots harshly.                                  

[END]

George Scialabba's Only a Voice: Essays has just been published by Verso.

These Are the Plunderers: How Private Equity Runs - and Wrecks - America by Gretchen Morgenson and Joshua Rosner. Simon & Schuster, 381 pages, $30.

Our Lives in Their Portfolios: Why Asset Managers Own the World by Brett Christophers. Verso, 310 pages, $29.95.

A specter is haunting capitalism: the specter of financialization. Industrial capitalism - the capitalism of "dark Satanic mills" - was bad enough, but it had certain redeeming features: in a word (well, two words), people and place. Factory work may have been grueling and dangerous, but workers sometimes acquired genuine skills, and being under one roof made it easier for them to organize and strike. Factories were often tied, by custom and tradition as well as logistics, to one place, making it harder to simply pack up and move in the face of worker dissatisfaction or government regulation.

To put the contrast at its simplest and starkest: industrial capitalism made money by making things; financial capitalism makes money by fiddling with figures. Sometimes, at least, old-fashioned capitalism produced - along with pollution, workplace injuries, and grinding exploitation - useful things: food, clothing, housing, transportation, books, and other necessities of life. Financial capitalism merely siphons money upward, from the suckers to the sharps.

Marxism predicted that because of competition and technological development, it would eventually prove more and more difficult to make a profit through the relatively straightforward activity of industrial capitalism. It looked for a while - from the mid-1940s to the mid-1970s - as though capitalism had proven Marxism wrong. Under the benign guidance of the Bretton Woods Agreement, which used capital controls and fixed exchange rates to promote international economic stability and discourage rapid capital movements and currency speculation, the US and Europe enjoyed an almost idyllic prosperity in those three decades.  But then American companies began to feel the effects of European and Japanese competition. They didn't like it, so they pressured the Nixon administration to scrap the accords. Wall Street, which the Bretton Woods rules had kept on a leash, sensed its opportunity and also lobbied hard -and successfully.

The result was a tsunami of speculation over the next few decades, enabled by wave after wave of financial deregulation. The latter was a joint product of fierce lobbying by financial institutions and the ascendancy of laissez faire ideology - also called "neoliberalism" - embraced by Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher and                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                     subsequently by Bill Clinton and Tony Blair. The idiocy was bipartisan: Clinton and Obama were as clueless as their Republican counterparts.

Among these "reforms" - each of them a dagger aimed at the heart of a sane and fair economy - were: allowing commercial banks, which handle the public's money, to take many of the same risks as investment banks, which handle investors' money; lowering banks' minimum reserve requirements, freeing them to use more of their funds for speculative purposes; allowing pension funds, insurance companies, and savings-and-loan associations (S&Ls) to make high-risk investments; facilitating corporate takeovers; approving new and risky financial instruments like credit default swaps, collateralized debt obligations, derivatives, and mortgage-based securities; and most important, removing all restrictions on the movement of speculative capital, while using the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to force unwilling countries to comply. Together these changes, as the noted economic journalist Robert Kuttner observed, forced governments "to run their economies less in service of steady growth, decent distribution, and full employment - and more to keep the trust of financial speculators, who [demanded] high interest rates, limited social outlays, low taxes on capital, and balanced budgets."

Keynes, the author of the Bretton Woods Agreement, warned: "Speculators may do no harm as bubbles on a steady stream of enterprise. But the position is serious when enterprise becomes the bubble on a whirlpool of speculation." That was indeed the position roughly fifty years after Keynes's death, and the predictable consequences followed. S&Ls were invited to make more adventurous investments. They did, and in the 1980s a third of them failed. The cost of the bailout was $160 billion. In the 1990s, a hedge fund named Long-Term Capital Management claimed to have discovered an algorithm that would reduce investment risk to nearly zero. For five years it was wildly successful, attracting $125 billion from investors. In 1998 its luck ran out. Judging that its failure would crash the stock market and bring down dozens of banks, the government organized an emergency rescue. The 2007-8 crisis was an epic clusterfuck, involving nearly everyone in both the financial and political systems, though special blame should attach to supreme con man Alan Greenspan, who persuaded everyone in government to repose unlimited confidence in the wisdom of the financial markets. Through it all, the Justice Department was asleep at the wheel. During the wild and woolly ten years before the 2008 crash, bank fraud referrals for criminal prosecution decreased by 95 per cent.

The Washington Consensus, embodying the neoliberal dogma of market sovereignty, was forced on the rest of the world through the mechanism of "structural adjustments," a set of conditions tacked onto all loans by the IMF. Latin American countries were encouraged to borrow heavily from US banks after the 1973 oil shock. When interest rates increased later in the decade, those countries were badly squeezed; Washington and the IMF urged still more deregulation. The continent's economies were devastated; the 1980s are known in Latin America as the "Lost Decade." In 1997, in Thailand, Indonesia, the Philippines, and South Korea, the same causes -

large and risky debts to US banks and subsequent interest-rate fluctuations - produced similar results: economic contraction, redoubled exhortations to

accommodate foreign investors, and warnings not to try to regulate capital flows. By the 2000s Europe had caught the neoliberal contagion: in the wake of the 2008 crisis, the weaker, more heavily indebted economies - Greece, Italy, Portugal, and Spain - were forced to endure crushing austerity rather than default. Financialization was a global plague.

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Around 1970, a brave new idea was born, which ushered in a brave new world. A young trader figured out how to buy things without money. More precisely, he realized that you could borrow the money to buy the thing while using the thing itself as collateral. Our young genius bought a company with borrowed money, using the company's assets as collateral for the loan. He then [OMIT?] transferred the debt to the company, which then in effect had to pay for its own hijacking, and eventually sold it for a tidy profit. The young trader had invented the leveraged buy-out (LBO).

The leveraged buy-out was the key to the magic kingdom of private equity. But LBOs are not good for everyone. To service its new debt, the acquired company often must cut costs drastically. This usually means firing workers and managers and overworking those that remain, selling off divisions, renegotiating contracts with suppliers, halting environmental mitigation, and eliminating philanthropy and community service. And even then, many companies failed - a far higher proportion of companies acquired in LBOs went bankrupt than those that weren't.

Fortunately, it was discovered around this time that workers, suppliers, and communities don't matter. In the wake of Milton Friedman's famous and influential 1972 pronouncement that corporations have no other obligations than to maximize profits, several business school professors further honed neoliberalism into an operational formula: the fiduciary duty of every employee is always and only to increase the firm's share price. This "shareholder value theory," which exalted the interests of investors over all others - indeed recognized no other interests at all - afforded [WORD?] the intellectual and moral scaffolding of the private equity revolution.

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Two excellent new books narrate, with complementary approaches, the alarming story of private equity's kudzu-like growth. These Are the Plunderers: How Private Equity Runs - and Wrecks - America by Pulitzer-Prize-winning reporter Gretchen Morgenson and her long-time writing partner Joshua Rosner provides blow-by-blow case histories, reconstructing tactics, analyzing legal conflicts, and affording the victims of PE depredations a face and a voice. (PE executives are generally faceless and rarely speak except to issue pro forma denials of everything through their extremely expensive lawyers.)

Morgenson and Rosner offer a précis of the PE playbook:

A high-performing operation is taken over and crippled with heavy debt taken on to pay for its acquisition. Real estate and other assets are stripped and sold, paying off the financiers who've taken charge. Pensions are slashed and employees fired or their jobs moved offshore. Decimated, the company flails and the financiers head to their next triumph.

An academic study found that around 20 percent of PE- acquired companies were bankrupt after 10 years, compared with two percent of all other companies. Another study looked at 10,000 companies acquired by PEs over a 30-year period and found that employment declined between 13 and 16 percent. A 2019 study found that "over the previous decade almost 600,000 people lost their jobs as retailers as retail collapsed after being bought by private equity."

Doctors and nurses at PE-owned health-care facilities are routinely suspended or fired for protesting inadequate staffing or equipment - not unrelated, probably, to the 10 percent higher fatality rate in PE-owned nursing homes. Hospital and nursing home charges at PE-acquired facilities often increase sharply; so do rents for PE tenants, leading to frequent mass evictions. PE Medicare reimbursement fraud is rampant, but Justice Department investigations are rare and penalties are minimal.

Morgenson and Rosner recount numerous horror stories, with a wealth of grisly detail. The centerpiece of their account is the destruction of a giant insurance company, Executive Life of California. The company had bought billions of dollars of junk bonds - high-interest, high-risk bonds -- from Drexel Burnham Lambert, a firm later found guilty of insider trading, fraud, and other financial crimes and forced out of business. One of Drexel's crimes was misrepresenting its junk bonds, so no one knew exactly how to value Executive Life's massive bond portfolio. Enter Leon Black, founder of the Apollo Fund and a former Drexel executive. He knew very well how much each of the company's bonds were worth, and if he could take over the company, that knowledge would be worth billions. Through a process "labyrinthine in its complexity" (indeed, this reviewer is still struggling to understand it), and aided by a bumbling state Insurance Commissioner, Apollo acquired Executive Life, keeping its bonds and shucking off its insurance portfolio to a small, spun-off corporation. Apollo made a $2 billion profit on the bonds; Executive Life's 300,000 policyholders lost, by Morgenson and Rosner's estimate, $3.9 billion in payouts.

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Brett Christophers is an academic rather than a journalist, and his approach in Our Lives in Their Portfolios is more analytical than that of We Are the Plunderers, though equally compelling. He proposes restricting the term "private equity" to the shares of companies that are not publicly traded, rather than to the investment firms - Apollo, Blackstone, Carlyle, KKR, et al - that take them private but also take over companies that remain publicly traded. All the funds organized by these buyout artists, whether their equity is public or private, are called "asset-manager funds." Using these definitions, only $5 trillion worldwide is managed as private equity. Of the remaining $98 trillion of assets under management, around 90 percent are financial assets - stocks and bonds. The other 10 percent is the world of "real assets," physical and social.

Asset manager funds buy highways, ports, water systems, energy (including wind and solar), farmlands, power generation facilities, waste management facilities, telecommunications, transportation systems, municipal parking meters and parking garages, single-family and multi-family housing, child-care centers, medical practices, nursing homes - anything with a cash flow. Adding financial to real assets, asset managers control more than 40 percent of the world's wealth, including more and more of the essential physical and social infrastructure of modern life. This is something new under the sun, Christophers claims: "a society in which the key physical systems supporting social life and its reproduction - so-called 'real assets' - are increasingly owned by institutional investors [pension funds, insurance companies, university endowments] specifically through the mediation of dedicated asset managers [the plunderers] and their investment funds." He calls it "asset manager society."

How did it come about? Two large developments paved the way. The first was the 2008 financial crisis, and in particular its aftermath: several years of rock-bottom interest rates. Pension funds and insurance companies, though traditionally conservative, needed some returns in order to meet their obligations, and neither bonds nor money market funds were offering much. These institutions did not have the financial expertise to make complicated (i.e., tax-avoidant) large-scale investments or the technical expertise to manage acquired companies or facilities. Asset-management investment funds were a perfect fit, and since their buyout financing relied heavily on debt, low interest rates were like high-octane fuel.

The second development, previously noted, was ideological. At first in the US and UK, then in Canada, Australia, and Europe, market fundamentalism - the belief that states could do nothing right and that the profit motive was invariably more efficient - led to the privatization of many traditionally public functions: building and maintaining highways and bridges; housing; elder care and nursing homes; water and sewer systems; energy production and distribution; and others. So bold were the privateers, so self-effacing were the public authorities, and so browbeaten were developing countries by the IMF that many investment fund managers demanded and received a guarantee against losses, a practice called "de-risking." Another investor-friendly arrangement was the Public-Private Partnership, which frequently guaranteed the fund a minimum revenue or pledged capital spending.

There are horror stories in Our Lives in T heir Portfolios, too. Asset manager KKR paid the city of Bayonne, New Jersey, $150 million, plus a promise to undertake capital improvements, in exchange for revenues from its water system over a 40-year period. After 5 years, rates had risen 20 percent, no improvements had been made, and KKR sold its interest for a 36 percent profit. The Carlyle Group entered a similar agreement with Missoula, Montana. It too sold its interest after 5 years for a large profit, leaving the water system in such bad shape that the city repossessed it under eminent domain.

But even more worrisome than these misfires and machinations, Christophers argues, is the fundamental mismatch between the asset-manager model and the real assets they are increasingly taking over. Asset managers prefer to invest in parts of large, integrated assets rather than the whole, since it is easier to isolate risk and return profiles. The result is often a patchwork with, for example, different owners of transmission and distribution assets within power systems, or of the pipes and the water within a water system. This, together with the invariably short-term nature of asset-manager involvement, makes long-term planning all but impossible. It is not the way to grow a business, Christophers warns, and it is not the way to sustainably manage infrastructure.

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Beyond exacerbating America's already grotesque economic inequality and upending (or ending) the lives of workers, tenants, hospital patients, and nursing home residents, private equity inflicts a more subtle, insidious harm on American society. As left-wing critics have pointed out all the way back to the 19-century Populists, a minimum of autonomy and control in the chief spheres of life is essential to achieving a balanced relationship to authority, neither belligerent nor servile, which in turn is a prerequisite to effective democratic citizenship. Industrialization, to which Populism was a response, was the first setback to America's 200-year tradition of popular economic independence. The post-World War II destruction of the family farm was another. The Reaganite/neoliberal destruction of labor unions was another. Private equity, by removing ownership and authority even further from the worker than the corporation did, paralyzes its subjects still more. Often the worker cannot even learn where his orders come from, much less confront their source. Distance and abstraction do not merely disempower; they infantilize. Such a workforce is no longer a fit democratic citizenry, the only force capable of taking on the financial juggernaut.

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There is something perversely impressive about private equity. With an energy and ingenuity worthy of a less sordid purpose, the plunderers have crafted a marvelously efficient machine for enriching themselves and have persuaded (or bribed) the political class not to interfere. If threatened, they will undoubtedly warn that the economy will collapse without them - that is, after all, how the banks got away with it last time. And who, in any case, is going to threaten them? A fragmented, dispossessed workforce that doesn't even know where to find its bosses?

The epitaph of Our Lives in Their Portfolios is a line from the CEO of Brookfield Asset Management, one of the world's largest: "What we do is behind the scenes. Nobody knows we're there." By and large, nobody does. It's true of government too. I only learned from Morgenson and Rosner that Jay Powell, the current chairman of the Fed, who spent $750 billion to save the corporate bond market, where private equity feeds, is himself a former private equity executive.

It will probably take an entity their own size to curb the financial industry's drive to own the world. Sweden, Denmark, South Korea and a few other states have fought at least some of the plunderers' worst abuses. The chance that the pirates' stronghold and base of operations, the United States, will do the same seems pretty slight. There's a glimmer of hope that the greed of the vampires will finally repel their own customers. The huge fees they charge their institutional investors, together with the high percentage they take of the profits, has led some of those investors to commission studies comparing how well they did with PE compared with how well they would have done putting the money into an index fund. It turns out to be a dead heat.

Maybe these investors will go on strike. Or maybe the US, UK, EU, Canada, and Australia will wiggle out from under the industry's thumb and rein in its egregious tax and other legal privileges. Or maybe the rest of us will see through the mystifications and navigate the political obstacle course they and their legislative allies will undoubtedly throw up to keep us from holding them accountable. If not, then we'll all be assets someday.

                                             [END]

George Scialabba's Only a Voice: Selected Essays will be published by Verso in August.